Putting the leap in Leap Day.

Hey everybody. Steve here. As I said in my post yesterday, sorry for not blogging as often as I probably should. Today it occurred to me that there is something I'd like to share with all of you before you arrive at our reception in March. And we're really excited about it.

As most of you know, our wedding ceremony proper will be a very intimate gathering of our parents, grandparents and siblings on February 29th, the day before everyone gathers at our reception on March 1st. That's right. We're getting married on Leap Day, which means an anniversary once every four years. We're going to be newlyweds for a loooong time. Sweet.

In thinking about ways to commemorate our Leap Day wedding, I remembered reading an article online a year ago that stuck with me about a celebrity photographer in the 50s and 60s named Philippe Halsman. In addition to working with the surrealist painter Salvador Dali, he often did a lot work for the most popular magazines of the day, i.e. Life, Look, etc. He took an amazing photograph of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that I actually had in postcard form as a teenager when I was dreaming of working in comedy someday.

But I digress.

Whenever Halsman would photograph any of his subjects, be they entertainers, political figures, scientists, anyone at all... he would ask them for one final picture at the end of each session. He would ask for a jump picture.

A jump picture is basically what is sounds like: Halsman would ask his subjects to jump in the air, as high or as low as they were physically able, and he would capture that moment in time when they seemed to be defying gravity.

I mentioned this to Nikki and thought it would be appropriate to get at least one picture in this style of the two of us when we finally got around to hiring a photographer. She happily agreed, and we mentally filed that away for future use.

Cut to a few weeks later when we started plowing through all of the details it seems you need when planning a wedding and reception. When we were reminded of needing a guest book for our reception guests, Nikki began to reflect on how successful these had been at other weddings she'd attended. More often then not, we agreed, these books were less comprehensive than one would hope for, and generally had the feeling of a ledger that would get placed on a shelf to sit for years. This seemed like an opportunity that was ripe for innovation.

And then... then Nikki said something that is totally illustrative of why I want to marry this woman in the first place. It was at this point Nikki said to me "what about your jump picture idea?"

That was it. I could have kissed her on the lips. And I probably did. I do that as often as I can.

After grilling a bunch of Atlanta photographers on how we might achieve this, we had a wonderful meeting with photographer Kristi Odom, an old GT classmate of Nikki's who was just as enthusiastic as we were about the idea. Her enthusiasm and the quality of her samples made hiring Kristi a very easy decision.

So here's what we're going to do:

When everyone first arrives to the reception on Saturday night, Kristi will have set up a well-lit white backdrop that spills forward onto the floor. As guests enter, Kristi will ask everyone to sign a simple piece of white paper before heading to the white backdrop to jump for their picture, either by themselves, as a part of a couple, or in a family group shot.

Now this is very important, and I want everyone to understand where we're coming from: Nikki and I both know that we're lucky enough to have guests coming to our reception of all ages, sizes, and mobilities. We're not going to ask anyone to jump who isn't physically able to do so. It's not a contest by any stretch of the imagination. We'd rather have your picture not jumping than to have you skip getting photographed. We're just hoping everyone can get in the spirit of what we're asking for. It's going to take 30 seconds and it won't hurt a bit. Promise.

After all of the photographs are taken and processed, Kristi is going to compose everyone's photograph with the signatures on the white paper into a hard-bound coffee table book for us, a collection of our guests on that special day taking the leap after we've taken the biggest of our lives. This is going to be our guest book, our collection of our family and friends intermingled, and I'm positive we're going to enjoy looking through it often over the years.

There. This is the kind of blog post I envisioned writing when we set up this thing. I'll try to be better about updating it as much as Nikki does.

Incidentally, if you'd like to read more about Philippe Halsman, the inspiration for this whole idea, here's the link to the Smithsonian.com article I read originally (be sure to click on the link for "more pictures" when you get there).

Hope all of you are well, and drop me a line if you want further clarification on what we're doing here.

-S