exciting announcements
March 3, 2010 | Filed Under photography | 21 Comments
so i have a couple of exciting bits of news to share with you all… the first is a little old; i’ve been sitting on it for the blog, although i did tweet about it a while back! but, in january i received an award from one of the national wedding service websites i am associated with, WeddingWire, an endeavor that links brides and vendors to facilitate wedding planning across the country.
from their press release about the 2010 Bride’s Choice Awards:
The annual Bride’s Choice Awards recognizes and celebrates excellence in quality and service within the wedding industry, as determined by recent reviews and extensive surveys from over 500,000 newlyweds.
Ayesha Ahmad Photography is among the top five percent of all vendors in the WeddingWire community, which includes over 100,000 wedding professionals across the US and Canada. Awards were given to winners across 19 different service categories, from wedding venues to wedding photographers.
the other news is more recent – just this week i received my long-awaited acceptance email to the fantastic Wedding Photojournalist Association, an organization that celebrates and upholds the standard of true photojournalism in wedding photography – capturing moments, emotions and stories as they unfold during the event, without direction or interference. every wedding has a place for posed shots, formal or informal, but for me the thrill, challenge and beauty lie in the truth of the day itself – the honor that i’ve been chosen to capture it, the responsibility of capturing it purely. so i’m absolutely thrilled to be accepted into WPJA, and – as a sometimes-writing-journalist, still – proud to call myself a wedding photojournalist.
from WPJA’s press release:
[WPJA is] an International, membership-based organization representing professional photographers skilled in the documentation of weddings and events in a candid, unobtrusive style. As a WPJA member, Ayesha Ahmad joins the ranks of some of the most talented wedding photojournalists in the world as judged by their technical, creative and visual aptitude.
Ayesha Ahmad will be held to strict membership standards regarding image quality and content, technical and creative technique, website and marketing professionalism, business ethics and communication. In turn, she gains prestigious affiliation with one of the industry’s top professional organizations. Ayesha Ahmad can further gain admittance into quarterly competitions, where her work will be judged by some of the world’s most respected and accomplished award-winning photojournalists.
so, here are the little badges you’ll see going up on my site soon! i’m so excited about these – if you know me at all, you know how much of my heart is in this business, and i can’t help but be thankful for the opportunity to work toward joining so many others whose work i admire and am inspired by.
AND, because no post is complete without a photograph… and this is all about moments… here’s one of my favorite father-daughter moments from sarah and eddie’s wedding last year 
tilt-shift musa
January 15, 2010 | Filed Under family photos, practice shoots | 1 Comment
played around with my tilt-shift lens the morning i had to return it. i still have a lot to learn with this lens, but it sure is fun….
(this first shot is actually with the 35L, not the tilt-shift…)
now, the tilt-shift pictures…
i don’t normally include two versions of the same shot, but i couldn’t decide which one i liked better…
and this one is musa’s favorite picture:
more tilt-shift: great falls, VA
November 21, 2009 | Filed Under nature, photography | 5 Comments
promise this is the last tilt-shift-only post!
but, i had a couple of hours to kill before i needed to return the lens to the fantastic folks at penn camera, and it was a beautiful day, and my friend saliha who lives not far from the place wasn’t working and loves hiking too… so we met up around midday at one of my most favorite parks in the world, great falls, on the virginia side of the potomac. with musa along, of course. i took only the 45mm ts-e lens so i could focus on trying it out a little more; found it was less of a struggle the next day, although that might have been because i was taking pictures of trees and a river, instead of people who had to wait for me i believe i might have begun to fall in love with this lens… but i still want the canon 35L first! someday!
a note: when i first began taking pictures in high school, i didn’t even like photographing people… it was always the outdoors, in the beginning, trying to capture beautiful landscapes or skyscapes or natural details, and i even hated having people IN the nature shots. so although my preference has changed quite a bit, this kind of exercise was a little bit of a return to myself…
couple shoot: tilt-shift experiment I
November 19, 2009 | Filed Under friends, photography, portraits | 19 Comments
the setting was sweet: georgetown, late afternoon, an unseasonably warm and sunny november day with a startlingly blue sky echoed in the potomac. the equipment was exciting: i rented a tilt-shift lens (canon 45mm 2.8 ts-e), which (from what i understand) is intended to offer advantages in architectural photography related to perspective and depth of field, but also makes for fantastically dreamy kinds of portraits and i wanted to try my hand at this after seeing many photographers i admire use it regularly, even for weddings. and the couple? perfect! well… don’t take my word for it, please adore their cuteness yourself
