Today's Guest: Jeremy Cook of Cook Images Photography in Pensacola, Florida
Today's Host: John Bentley
July 2007
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Jeremy Cook Transcript Page
Jeremy Cook Expert PageANNOUNCER: Welcome to the VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.
ANNOUNCER: Today's program is sponsored by morephotos.com the online photo sales solution to professional photographers worldwide.
JOHN: Today we are in the Studio with Jeremy Cook of Cook Images Photography of Pensacola, FL. Welcome to VTalk Radio's Photographer's Spotlight, Jeremy.
JEREMY: Thanks a lot.
JOHN: Tell us a little bit about your business down there in Pensacola, FL.
JEREMY: We're a husband and wife team. My wife, her name is Hara, and myself we do photography full time. We've been doing it for about 6 years. We are more geared towards weddings, but we love doing families and kids as well because we have 3 children ourselves. So, we really enjoy doing that kind of stuff as well. We live on the beaches of Pensacola so we do a lot of stuff out there as well so it's a really good spot, and we just love what we do.
JOHN: Tell our listeners some of the services that you are offering for weddings and families.
JEREMY: Ok, we do wedding coverage, not only in the Pensacola area, but we also travel around. Recently we've been getting booked in Atlanta as well and Jacksonville. We don't do any studio stuff inside a studio. We do all location shoots so everything is geared towards the outdoors in a natural element and just kind of whether it be a broken down barn or just out in the field or in a park, whatever it is, we just love doing that kind of stuff. It's more lifestyle portrait than anything. Let's see. Usually we do two to three family sessions a week. We're pretty limited on those. We do about one to two weddings per weekend. So, we stay pretty busy with that, and we love doing newborn sessions. They're a lot of fun and when we do those, we actually travel to the client's home or we can meet them here at our consulting office and use window light for that kind of session. We really gear our business towards natural lighting so it's really cool.
JOHN: And certainly being down there in Florida you have lots of opportunities to do beach photography.
JEREMY: Sure.
JOHN: What about some of the communities in the area, cities in the area that you service?
JEREMY: Mostly we do a lot in Pensacola which is really cool as well as we go out to Destin, FL, Sandestin, the Santa Rosa beaches area is Great Beach and Watercolor, all of those really beautiful beaches, Seaside, really cool places where we get a lot of destination weddings. People who fly in from pretty much all over the place to get married on the beaches here so it's really nice and it's not that far away. It's only about an hour and a half drive for us. So it's really cool. Those are probably the biggest places that we hit as well as Gulf Shores, Alabama, and even small towns like Brewton, Alabama. So, I mean we do quite a bit of traveling just around this area.
JOHN: What about wedding facilities or banquet halls that you like to use, or have used a lot in the past?
JEREMY: Sure lots and lots of weddings. Well on the beach, of course, and we have a beautiful historical church in downtown Pensacola called Old Christ Church. We do just massive amounts of weddings there every year; very beautiful church, and the cool part of that is it's right there in downtown Pensacola where you just walk around and within 2 blocks you get just a whole schedule of just different things to shoot clients with, you know, so you get all these different elements involved in different colors and just really cool stuff. We also do lots of receptions like there's a great venue that here locally that just opened up, and it's just an amazing spot. It's got kind of the old brick look inside; lots of natural lighting coming in the windows. Just beautiful spot and great food as well so we do that there and let's see, any other churches, there's just, I mean we're in the bible belt, man.
JOHN: Yes. I'm sure there are lots of churches.
JEREMY: There's lots of churches, and like I said, lots of beach weddings.
JOHN: Jeremy, I was looking at your website and I noticed you have quite a flair for creativity and spontaneity in the shots that you are taking in the sessions you are doing for clients. Tell us a little bit about your perspective when you're going in to shoot.
JEREMY: When we go into a shoot, we drink lots of caffeine, no - I'm just kidding. Well actually we do, but we're not here to just kind pose people, we're here to really capture what's going on and capture personality and emotion and just everything that's going on with the people not so much just faces, but you know there's just so much more going on so that's kind of our take on...even when we're doing children's portraits. We just like for the kids to be kids, you know, it's not so much about just sit here and smile and give me a fake smile, but it's about you know who is this kid and what would a mom really like to see? They'd really like to see their kid you know. So that's kind of a our approach when we go in to do a session of any kind. Especially on the wedding scenes, because there's just so many people there. So many friends. So many family members and they all have these personalities that just come together and there's just so much love. It's great because people hire us to capture one of the happiest days of their lives. So it's just really cool. That's kind of our approach on it.
JOHN: What would you consider your most important goal when you're doing a photo session?
JEREMY: The most important goal to us, unless our clients are just absolutely just screaming hysterically on the phone, we have done our job. We like our clients to be extremely happy with the outcome of the session no matter it is, and so our main goal is just to please the clients, but to do what we always do by just approaching every session with our own style and their personality.
JOHN: Jeremy could you give us your website information and contact information?
JEREMY: Sure, sure. Our website is www.cookimages.com and most of our contact information you can get right there through the website. You can even contact us through the website. There's a little thing you can fill out on both, because we have two different websites. We have www.cookimages.com which goes to our splash page which links to www.cookimages.com, www.cookimageskids.com which is our kids and family site and we also have our blog link on there as well.
JOHN: What about a phone number?
JEREMY: Our phone number is (850) 470-2613 and email is just jeremy@cookimages.com.
JOHN: We are speaking with Jeremy Cook of Cook Images Photography of Pensacola, FL. You are listening to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. We're going to step aside for these important messages, we'll be right back.
ANNOUNCER: Looking for a bridal show in your area? Visit www.weddingdetails.com for a list of upcoming bridal shows in your area. Visit www.weddingdetails.com tonight. We now return you to the VTalk Radio Photographer Spotlight, with your host, John Bentley.
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ANNOUNCER: This VTalk Radio Spotlight is sponsored by morephotos.com, the online photo sales solution to professional photographers worldwide.
ANNOUNCER: We now return you to the VTalk Radio Photographer's Spotlight with your host, John Bentley. JOHN: Welcome back to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. Today we are in the studio with Jeremy Cook of Cook Images Photography of Pensacola, FL. Welcome to the program, Jeremy.
JOHN: Now, we've been talking about your photography business down there in Florida. Looks like you have some interesting things on your site. One of them is a contest you're doing called Rock the Dress. Tell us about the Rock the Dress contest.
JEREMY: Well most people have probably heard of trash the dress and it's pretty much just kind of our own spin on it. We haven't had the opportunity to do a trash the dress session so what we thought we would do was go ahead and have a contest where we could actually get the opportunity to do this and kind of just have creative freedom if we just had some people willing to get their dresses out in the elements whether be in a field or on a bale of hay or in the ocean or whatever it would be so that's kinda what that's all about. Pretty much all we're doing is just taking any bride that's already had her wedding, she can register with us, and we're going to be drawing names and just kind of picking about two or three brides to just pretty much trash the dress. We called it rock the dress, it's just kind of our own flair on it. We're a little more on the rock and roll side of photography I think so that just seemed to fit better so we just called it Rock the Dress.
JOHN: Good. Now also you have a link on your site called the boudoir. Tell us a little bit about that.
JEREMY: Those are pretty much for brides to be. My wife actually does those sessions and their geared towards a bride who might want to give her groom on the wedding day a really cool book of just pictures of her so that's kind of what that's geared towards. Just something that a bride to be can give to her new husband on the wedding day.
JOHN: Very nice. Now speaking of books, obviously, you are putting portfolios together in books. You have what are called art books. Tell us about what you're offering there.
JEREMY: Currently we're doing three different what we call artbooks. They're pretty much wedding albums, but they are more artistic, because we actually design them and recently we actually placed in our local Professional Photographers Guild and merited on our album designs. So we're really excited about that so we thought, you know, why don't we just give clients choices on what style of book they want to do. So we offer three different art books. We can do them for pretty much anything. We have the expressive art book. We have the inspired art book and we have the distinctive art book. They're kind of rated in an order as the Express is kind of the basic, the Inspired is kind of a mid-range book, and the Distinctive is pretty much the bomb-diggity album. So the Expressive Album is really cool, though, even though it's kind of basic, the cover actually we design the cover and we design every page in it and it's a 12x9 album and we just put them together pretty quick, but they turn out great. It's a storybook style album as well as...all of them are pretty much storybook style. The Inspired Album comes with a little more durable cover. It has any type of leather, we have all these different colors and textures to the leather, and we can do cameos in the middle of them like square cameos that we design. Those are really hot items. And the Distinctive is one of the albums we get through Graphy Studio which is an awesome album company and the one that we chose to work with has a metal cover and the image is actually somehow placed onto the metal so that you have this shiny image for the cover of the album so it's really cool and it's a really thick book around 50 pages that we design for that one.
JOHN: Now are there album samples on the site?
JEREMY: Yes, there are. We try to put everything, even though it's kind of hard to tell exactly what's going on with the books, we did put samples of all the products we offer online under the goods in the rockin images section.
JOHN: Now you also have a blog there on your website. What do you talk about on your blog?
JEREMY: On our blog pretty much that's just an update of daily whatever stuff. Just anything, I mean, we can go in there and we can just kind of babble if we want or we can put images from the wedding we've done the week before or the children's session. Just to keep things fresh. We have a lot of, I guess, what you call blog stalkers, right, and they just check out your stuff all the time. We just try to keep it fresh and interesting for any of the blog stalkers out there that are just checking out local photographers and it just kind of keeps us in the back of their minds in case anything ever comes up where they have a kid or they're going to have a wedding or whatever, they've been traveling through our site pretty often.
JOHN: I was wondering, obviously, you're doing a lot of digital photography. It seems that's what most photographers are doing anymore. Do you do standard film also?
JEREMY: Not at all. My wife shot film for a while when we first started, but I was never a film kind of guy. So we pretty much threw that out the window when the first digital SLR. Actually, I don't think we got the first digital SLR, but we did get the Canon D60 and we've been rolling with that ever since. I was more into graphic arts when we started so we just pulled our talents together and before we knew it we were both shooting and we both do the graphic stuff, and we do a ton of post production work. So, when we shoot a wedding, even though they get you know 4 - 600 images, it's not just snap shot images, these images are very artistic, black and whites are highly contrast, just real dramatic stuff. It makes your colors pop, and just we want people to be extremely pleased and just in awe with what they see.
JOHN: Now do you both go out and shoot a wedding at the same time?
JEREMY: Absolutely. There's no other way, I don't know how one person shoots a wedding. I know they do it, but we have two...I mean the cool thing is my wife and I we have a guy's perspective and we have a girl's perspective. So I'm kind of able to hang with the guys and just do kind of guy shots, you know, just hang out keep the guys real cool and calm, you know. Most guys are just scared of a photographer. It's like, dude, I really don't want to do these pictures, but if we just go and hang out and just kind of have fun, it turns out great. And the same thing with the ladies. Either ladies really love to have their pictures taken, or they're just kind of skittish about it and when you go in there and you're just kind of real happy and you try to be bubbly and just fun, you know, it just adds this whole element of just a good time. And you have a great experience and when you have a great experience and you look back at your pictures, it's like wow, this was alot of fun. Look what happened here. That's kind of our approach on that, but yeah, we both shoot at all times we have two cameras running. Even when we go to a family shoot or kid's shoot. We usually both have a camera with us.
JOHN: It certainly gives you a different perspective and different angles.
JEREMY: Right.
JOHN: Now, obviously, when you're doing a wedding, you know, the ladies are kind of tucked away so you probably don't want a guy going in there...
JEREMY: Right. Yeah.
JOHN: While they're dressing and stuff.
JEREMY: How weird is that?
JOHN: Yeah, but what do you think is the big difference between the male and female perspective?
JEREMY: Well, nine times out of ten, and I'm just saying nine times out of ten because I've had that one time out of ten when the guy was super excited about his pictures. You know, and that was totally cool too, because the guy shots we just went way overboard, but he had just a ton to look at. But most of the time the ladies are way more into the pictures than the guys are. So my goal as a guy and as the photographer is to go in and put them at ease, you know, and not have them stand there and feel cheesy and feel stupid, but to just kind of just run with it. Make them feel cool, you know, this is their day, why not make them feel good about it.
JOHN: We are speaking with Jeremy Cook of Cook Images Photography of Pensacola, FL. Jeremy, could you kindly give web site info and contact information one more time?
JEREMY: Sure, sure. Our website is www.cookimages.com and our phone number is (850) 470-2613.
JOHN: It certainly has been a pleasure having you on the program this morning, Jeremy.
JEREMY: Well thanks a lot for having me. It was a lot of fun.
JOHN: Your are listening to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. I am your host, John Bentley, thanks for joining us today. Have a great afternoon.
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