This blog is where my personal and business life intersect. I'm a a multi-passionate creative who teaches people how to create faster roadmaps to abundance in work and life through the doorways of business consulting and reiki teaching. If you'd like a DIY workbook to plan for your own creative living, check out my Pricing Workbook for Creatives. You'll see that I travel the world as often as I can and keep a gratitude journal as a reminder to find strength in my challenges.
I was a full-time professional photographer for 15 years, so there are still many cringe-worthy archives of my early work and artistic journey on this 19 year old blog. I've written loads of creative business advice over on the Photolovecat blog, and have started sharing reiki healing stories and healing moments over on the Abundant Sphere blog. If you'd like to learn more about me, here's a TEDx Talk of what my guiding questions have been to help me tune into my natural gifts and purpose. I'm available for workshops, presentations, interviews, and private consultations on creative business topics and for the advancement of arts programs in schools and communities:
ANNE ON TEDX
You're invited to join me in celebrating my 2nd year at Western Ave Studios and my 6th year in business as a full time photographer! The last year has brought great balance and peace to my life, and I can't wait to share that with you. For the first time since I started my business, I have FINALLY been in the same city for more than 2 years!! There's so much that goes into those first two years of opening a business or starting in a new city that I'm soooo glad to finally be in a place where I can experience the fruits of building a great team of people to work with! So....
Let's Get Our Party On!
Where: Anne Ruthmann Photography - Studio 302, 122 Western Ave, Lowell, MA 01851 When: Saturday April 2nd, 2011. 12-5pm Studio Open House, 5pm - 9pm Stay & Party with Glen David Andrews Band RSVP & Map: So I can have enough gifts for all guests http://on.fb.me/anne411
(Don't live near me? I might be visiting your area soon!! For cities and dates, [CLICK HERE]!)
PS. The idea for the "Anne-iversary" came from my dear friends & photography colleagues Rich & Ashley Pizzuti, who also helped with the image above. They celebrated their "Anne-iversary" as the day we first met and I "helped them get their heads out of their @$$" by inviting them to get more connected with the local community of photographers. We've become such good friends since that first meeting and I really admire how quickly they've grown since then!
Today is Dena & Jeff's 4th wedding anniversary!! I thought I'd check in with a little facebook interview to see what their thoughts are on four years of marriage...
Anne: Four years since the wedding, what's changed since then? Has anything stayed the same?
Dena: Well, we are now four, with the addition of Miss Evaline on 01.09.10. Cisco [the adorable dog] is still with us getting older, but still sweet as ever. We are still living in Clearwater. Jeff is still at the same company. I am now a stay at home mom with a side business at www.denarella.com. [I love her upcycled bags!]
Jeff: The biggest change: our daughter Evaline was born this past January. There may have been other changes over the last four years, but they're all eclipsed by the joy (and terror) she's brought into our lives.
Anne: When looking back on your wedding day- what do you remember most? Was there anything you would do differently if you could do it again?
Dena: The friends and family that came together to have a great party. Dancing, eating and socializing with everyone! If I had to do it differently I would of taken group photos before the ceremony. I also would of made the list of photos that I really wanted to make sure that we got them - like you suggested :)
Jeff: You mean other than the obligatory "my beautiful wife walking down the aisle"?
The band.
After our original band cancelled a few weeks before the big day, we were able to find a Blues Brothers tribute band that could perform on short notice. I was worried we'd end up with a theme wedding based on a theme neither of us wanted.
They showed up for the reception... all seven of them, including a full horn section and rocked out all night long to the delight of our guests. The next day, our caterer told us that in the hundreds of weddings he'd been to, he'd never seen so many people on the dance floor for so long.
Anne: What advice would you give to a couple who's planning their wedding right now?
Dena: My biggest advice to couples is to trust in your vendors. Research them and then let them do their job. They do this for a living and they usually know best. Also dont sweat the small things. In the end they do not make a difference and no one will notice except you!
Jeff: Don't sweat the details. I can say this because I was the guy portion of the equation, but I think my wife would agree. On our wedding day, she found out the flowers delivered were totally different than what was ordered, but beautiful nonetheless. She didn't make a big deal out of it because the guests wouldn't have noticed and it would have gotten in the way of why we were there that day: to have a great party with our family and friends.
...and get a band.
Anne: I have to ask... what did you end up doing (if anything) with your wedding photos?
Dena: Um. . . We have a bunch around the house. Jeff also made me a 1st year photo book that has them in there. We also gave most of our family framed photos. I still need to make photo books for ourselves and our parents.
Jeff: We have a few of the photos, in frames, around the house. But, we're both pretty tech savvy, so all of our favorites are in digital photo frames, or screen savers, or photo slide shows. I end up seeing a few different photos of our wedding every day.
Anne: Can you share your top 10 favorite wedding images and why you love them?
Dena: I almost bit it coming down the stairs. Too funny.
Loved having my cousins, room mate from college, and my sister with me for the wedding.
I love this beach. I wanted to get married here since I was small.
What a great group of guys!
Daddy tear - nice shot anne.
My dad got the sand from the beach, and it was a bit wet. Stuck in the bottom.
Our personalities exactly!
Our new family!
My favorite all time PHOTO!
Why you buy a $200 dress and not spend a fortune!
SPEND THE MONEY ON A REAL BAND. It is worth it! My caterer said that he has never seen so many people on the dance floor EVER!
Anne: What have these last four years of marriage taught you?
Dena: Patience, Love and Understanding. Things will happen in time and enjoy the moment you are in.
Jeff: What have I learned? If this was the Newlywed Game, I'd guess that Dena would say, "not enough."
However, I would say that having a partner to share my life and experiences has made the bad times better and the good times extraordinary.
Every once in a while, a couple comes along that changes my life forever...
I tend to fall in love with people while photographing them and often come away from the experience with a sense of admiration and love that is normally difficult to achieve when you're just meeting someone for the first time. Now, I'm not sure if my couples end up feeling the same way about me, but hopefully they see my love in the images they end up with. ;-) Sally & Rodney just blew me away with their kindness, joy, love, compassion, and inner beauty, which resonates in everything they do and with everyone they meet. While most couples will keep in touch maybe a year or two after their wedding, they often slip out of contact and remain beautiful memories, but Sally & Rodney have only become closer to me as friends over the years and through the many different twists and turns our lives have taken since then.
They were probably the 9th or 10th wedding I was ever hired to photograph, and if I recall, they hired me after running into some trouble with the original photographer they had hired. There were so many things that could have upset them on their wedding day (running an hour late, rain, vendors blowing up on people, the wrong music being played, etc) but their love was so strong that none of that mattered. Their perspective on what matters most in life is so admirable.
I was still trying to find my style at that time, which is quite clear from some of the processing on the images, but how I see and what I care about capturing have remained much the same- especially the unexpected moments that can't be replicated. I owe so much to this couple because in the years immediately following their wedding, they referred so many wonderful couples to me and almost single-handedly gave me the confidence to quit teaching elementary music so that I could just focus on photographing people in love. Really, there are no words to capture the love I feel when I think about Sally & Rodney. Instead, I merely offer my memories of their wedding day in celebration of their 4th Anniversary of Wedded Bliss. ;) Click on the image above to view their complete wedding slideshow. (Here's a link to the original post I did for their wedding.)
I can't believe it's been five years since Alex and I got married! Where does the time go? I've seen many of my couples go on to have a sense of settling down and maybe even having children, but somehow that still seems so distant for us. In the five years that we've been married, we've lived in 4 different homes, in 3 different states. I can't say that I ever imagined this to be the normal post-marriage lifestyle! I thought life would get slower... calmer... more relaxing.... more predictable... yet each year has brought about new surprises and big changes- always keeping me on my toes with running shoes on!
I'll be shooting a wedding out of town for a great couple on our anniversary date (Oct 18), but decided to carve out this weekend so that Alex and I could spend some much needed time together. Working from home is both a blessing and a curse - as I'm sure many people can agree. While I am technically home Tues-Thurs, I'm generally working around the clock just to keep everything moving forward since Fri-Mon are non-stop travel and shooting. The move this year has proven to be much more time consuming that previous moves for a lot of different reasons. One of which is that Massachusetts is a great state that likes to take care of its residents, which means tons of forms to fill out and hoops to jump through in order to be a responsible citizen and business owner. To all my friends in Michigan and Indiana - be thankful that things are easier than they could be! The boxes you saw in my moving post? Yeah, they're still there- and it kinda looks like some of them exploded in various places around the house, but that's a project I'm not planning to tackle until January- after I've taken care of my clients. Anyway, I digress..
One of my goals for this year was to make more time for my husband, family, and friends. Last year I pretty much neglected everyone that was important to me because I let my business consume me in a very stressful way. While I still have more work than time this year (which became unavoidable after moving in the middle of peak wedding season), I have made it a bigger priority to take time for family and friends, which has actually helped me be more productive and keep things in perspective better. I think the single biggest improvement this year is that my husband and I have made it a point to spend dinner together as often as possible, which is a big improvement from last year. Even if it's just an hour and we really don't talk about anything important during that time, it's a chance for us to do something relaxing together and to enjoy each other's company without a computer in between us. In the first few years of our marriage, he used to wish that I would go to bed on his sleeping schedule, but he's a morning person and I'm a night person - so I find it hard to sleep when my mind and body are still in the mood to be productive. It took a few years of debating this back and forth, but eventually he respected my need to work late into the night, which allowed me to spend an extra hour with him during his awake schedule. Of course I would love to be on the same sleeping schedule, but my biological clock still hasn't come around to that idea yet - then again, it's much easier when I'm not trying to cram in more work than I have time for, which is why a weekend for us to focus on each other is so important to the health of our relationship. On one hand it's kind of sad that it takes an Anniversary for it to happen, on the other hand, thank goodness for Anniversaries as a reminder that we need to spend some extended alone time together!
While this may seem like pretty personal information - I think all couples experience something like this that deals with a set of expectations they may have about how married couples are supposed to be together. Everyone is different and brings a different set of expectations to the relationship. Sometimes those expectations don't show up until you start living together, or until you have new jobs, or until you have children, but they're always there and you're always much better off if you spend a little time talking about your expectations with each other when something doesn't seem to be happening the way you thought it should, rather than banging your head against the wall wondering why or when the other person will get on the same page. Marriage isn't a contract you sign on your wedding day - it's a constant negotiation that requires a lot of hard work, compromise, and trust. After 5 years, Alex and I still don't have each other all figured out, but we do keep on trying to better understand one another and appreciate each other's point of view.
With every wedding I photograph, I also get a wonderful message and reminder of what marriage should aim to be. I think the last ceremony I photographed made a great point, by asking us to replace the words "love is" with "I am" in the very famous 1 Corinthian 13 passage, so that it would read like this....
I am patient, I am kind. I do not envy, I do not boast, I am not proud. I am not rude, I am not self-seeking, I am not easily angered, I keep no record of wrongs. I do not delight in evil but rejoice with the truth. I always protect, always trust, always hope, always persevere. I never fail.
The kicker was this... if you read that and feel a little guilty that you aren't really good at some of those things- than you know what you need to work on- for yourself, and for your relationship. I think at some point in time I've felt that I wasn't enough of each one of those things, but I know that I'm not perfect and that it's a process of learning and growing- always striving to improve. I feel lucky to have Alex who also understands my good and bad, and who loves me anyway.
Each year Alex and I trade off planning our anniversary. This year it was my turn and I thought we'd combine two of our favorite things - Alex's love of Cheese (the groom's cake at our wedding was a wheel of Smoked Gouda- see above), and my love of all things Autumn. When it comes to those two things, what better place to go than Vermont (especially when it's such a short drive)! Sure enough, this is going to be peak timing for fall color in Vermont, and there's a Cheese Trail to help us navigate from farm to farm...
As of right now, we're just going to be spontaneous and see where the road takes us for the next few days. While there's sure to be cheese and fall color, I'm also hoping for a little hiking, apple picking, horseback riding, and it would be a dream come true if we did a hot air balloon ride (but Alex is not so fond of heights- so that one could remain a dream.) If you're following me on Twitter or on Facebook - I'm going to send updates with iphone pictures along the way. Alex and I are going to try to refrain ourselves from computer use in order to maximize our time together (VERY hard for both of us), so I will return any messages late Monday or Tuesday. Thank you so much for understanding while I try to be a better wife!! Special thanks to Andry Sander for preserving our wonderful wedding memories!!
Four years ago today, Alex and I promised to spend the rest of our lives together. What an amazing journey it's been so far! If you'd like to see what our wedding was like, take a look at ==> my old bio on theknot.com. I totally thought they would have deleted it by now, but it's still there!
Alex and I don't really exchange gifts because ultimately it just becomes "stuff", but we do like to travel whenever we get the chance. So this year Alex surprised me by getting us a weekend cruise to the Bahamas!!
It will be the FIRST TIME since BEFORE we were married that we'll be taking a vacation JUST FOR US! We've traveled a lot together, but our trips have always been combined with work, conferences, or family celebrations. Even our honeymoon was part of an international conference for Alex! Can you believe that we've never had a vacation ALONE as a MARRIED COUPLE?! Seems pretty pathetic when you think about it like that!!
This will be our second cruise on Royal Caribbean and I think it's because Alex loved the Mojitos so much the first time!! On our first cruise to the Western Caribbean I was really excited about the ports of call and excursions, so I ended up being very disappointed when one of our ports of call was canceled and we had to stay on board. I wanted to DO STUFF and SEE STUFF, which is how I'm used to vacationing... always on the go! So this time, I'll be prepared to just relax, lay out, pig out (oink, oink), get a spa treatment and maybe fit in a yoga class and some climbing on the rock climbing wall. We won't be leaving for a few weeks- I have to wait until I get my first weekend off from weddings and photoshoots, but I'll be sure to share pictures and some tips on cruising when we get back! ;) I can't believe this will be our first REAL vacation in 5 years!!! It seriously feels like we've only been married for 2 years - where does the time go!??!
I LOVE YOU ALEX!!! Thank you for four wonderful years and many, many more!
It was definitely a cold weekend for being out and about in the windy city, but we still managed to have a great time! It's hard for us to go on a vacation without doing something work related, so Friday Alex visited one of his student teachers for an observation, and then I shot an engagement session in Lincoln Park along the lakeshore. Friday night we headed out to the House of Blues restaurant to see if we could catch one of our favorite local Chicago bands called Big James and the Chicago Playboys. The first time we saw them was actually at 5th Avenue in Royal Oak and they were just so awesome we had to see them again. We didn't stay long enough to see them, but the food was still good.
(don't judge me by my terrible point & shoot skills! I couldn't fit my DSLR in my pocket!)
After dinner we headed out to see Second City's WAR which is closing out its fourth year running. It was rrrrrrreallly funny! Tons of political humor, but also some Colbert style truthiness too. My favorite part was the improv.. because it requires an incredibly quick-witted mind. I hear they're coming out with a new show soon, so I'm glad we were able to see the old one before it ended.
Saturday we headed to the theatre district for lunch and a little window shopping. We also happened to run into a Jesse Jackson rally for school funding, and this fun halloween event in Daley plaza.
I couldn't leave without getting a picture in front of the Picasso sculpture!
After lunch at Ronny's, we went to see the new show, Pirate Queen from the makers of Les Mis and Miss Saigon. Right now the show is running in front of audiences to try out different things before hitting broadway. I don't want to be a spoiler, but I think the show still needs some work before it'll get rave reviews. The costumes however, were simply amazing!! The choreography, done in Riverdance style, was also pretty cool. The poster is a little deceiving, suggesting that most of it takes place on water, but actually most if it takes place in Ireland.
Saturday night we headed out to Northwestern University to see Sherrill Milnes share some of his lifelong professional opera career experience. We also had a great dinner at a little cafe in Evanston called Symphony's. Yummmy!!! Sunday we headed back to Terre Haute so I could do another engagement session (in a VERY cool location) and then REST after a long, eventful, and enjoyable weekend!
To my husband... Happy 3rd Anniversary!! I love you more and more with each year we share!!!
