All about John & Kelly

	Q & A with the Wikmans

	Q: How did you guys get interested in Photography? Kelly: I've always been interested in it in some way. My dad used to take me out with him to do house appraisals when I was a kid, and I'd always get to run the camera to take photos of the houses. John: I actually remember the defining moment of my entrance into photography. I was just out of college and my main hobby was keeping saltwater aquariums. I was sitting on the floor in the living room in front of my tank, and I had a webcam hooked up to an ancient laptop trying to take a picture of a coral. I was frustrated and fed up and I knew there had to be a better way. This was back when digital photography was still very much a niche thing; the fanciest camera out there was around 2MP and went for over $1000. And being just out of college, I had...ahem...'limited funds.' Kelly: That's an understatement! John: Hah, yeah thanks for that! Anyway, Kel and I had just gotten engaged, and we went to see her parents in southern Indiana. One evening during the visit we went to the riverboat casino there. Now you have to understand that in general I have the worst luck. I mean, if it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all! So I'm nursing a rum-and-coke and slowly losing the $10 in quarters I had set aside for this little venture. I had exactly three quarters left. I was tired, I smelled like smoke from all the people in the bar next to us, and I wanted to go to bed. I dropped all three quarters into the slot at once and pulled the lever. Lights and sirens started going off, and Kelly says, "You won!!" But no quarters were coming out of the machine. I was quite confused. Turns out I had won just over $1200...just about the right amount for that 2MP digital camera.

	Q: So do you guys always work together? Kelly: When we can! On commercial and sports shoots, we're almost always together just because they're such hectic, crazy events we need that many hands. John: Yep. At weddings it's much the same. We enjoy working together and I think we can give much better coverage with both of us, so nearly all of our photography packages include a second photographer. Q: How quickly do you book up for weddings? John: Currently we're booking out about ten to fourteen months. That's not to say we don't still have dates open earlier, but prime dates go quickly. You can check your date by looking at our calendar.

	Q: How would you categorize your photography style? John: Our backgrounds in photography and current interests in photography are so diverse that I don't think I could put a label on our style. We really run the gamut. Kelly: Yes. For example, John used to do a lot of studio portraiture, so he's really good with lighting and controlling the technical aspects of the cameras. John: Kelly's still better at posing than me, though! Seriously, what we photograph every day can vary as greatly as night and day. We'll shoot a landscape in the morning and a team photo in the afternoon, then a quick battery charge overnight and a wedding the next day. I think it really keeps us fresh and keeps our photography constantly evolving. Q: Can you talk a bit about your hardware systems? Kelly: John's the networking and SAN guy. I'll let him talk about all the techie stuff... John: I'm such a nerd! Our main computer system is an HP with an Intel Core-2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM. We've got about 750GB of hard drive space in the main computer itself, and a stack of external hard drives. All totaled, we've got about 3.5TB (yes, that's terabytes) of storage space. We employ a five-stage backup process that makes our image integrity about as foolproof as possible. Images are backed up as they're taken in-camera, then to two separate hard drives and onto optical media for storage in a fire safe. RAW images are also backed up to an online SAN system. Kelly: Uhhh...I'm in IT, and I barely understood a word of that. John: I guess I got too geeky, huh? How about this... At any given point in time we have between 200,000 and 300,000 images stored in our systems, and we've never lost a single image. Q: I'm looking at your wedding pricing, and to be honest it's a lot cheaper than I would expect for the equipment you use and for having two full-fledged photographers. You're about two-thirds the price of a lot of other photographers. What's up with that? John: From the very beginning of doing wedding photography professionally, we knew that we wanted to always see things from the couple's perspective. I won't lie, the money is important, if for no other reason than we use pretty expensive cameras that will wear out all too soon. Kelly: Often though John will leave a check sitting on the desk for a week before he gets time to go to the bank with it. That's because he's always editing photos. John: It really is all about the images for us. We actually get in arguments about who gets the best shot at a wedding! Kelly: (It's usually me!)
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