Emma Rose Photography | The next step for Applehead Studio

“Don’t let your silly dreams fall in between the crack of the bed and the wall.”

 

I remember it like it was yesterday. Josephine Morrison’s IB math class at Sydney Academy. I sat in the back row, with Doug Mollon on my right and Ed Stewart on my left.  Straight ahead were the backs of the heads of Elaine Littlejohn, Bobbi Morrison, Brent Hawrylak, Victor Chisholm and Derrick Rice…the really smart kids, all confidently nodding and agreeing with the mystery math that was being put on the board. These same heads would nod the same nods in physics and chemistry and economics.

I was the least smart kid in the smart kid class.

Emma was the smart girl. Quiet and confident, she was the girl who always got 100, on everything. She lived just outside of the city and came to Sydney Academy just for the IB program and when we graduated, she left with suitcases of money and scholarships and I left with a few gas cards to go to UCCB.

That was the last time I saw Emma for years. There was no Facebook.

Years later, I’m driving a blue Dodge minivan, selling pharmaceuticals by day and shooting weddings on the weekends. On one very random day, I ran into Emma at Shoppers Drug Mart. I was so happy to see her and…yadda yadda yadda, bla, bla, bla…shes a wedding photographer too!

Over the next few years we stay in touch and develop a very cool friendship again. I’d see her at the wedding shows with these really creative booth designs and elegant press printed business cards with pink foil embossing. My last minute booth design meanwhile had slanted so badly it almost destroyed the Kitchen Door booth behind us. It was high school math all over again.

I once signed up for a workshop in New York City from a few photographers I really wanted to learn from and who strolls in? Emma Rose. Over the years she’s vouched for me to get into a few associations and organizations and has, on numerous occasions, talked me out of a few artistic hissy fits. Steph and I have both come to value her opinion on all things wedding photography.

We occasionally joked about teaming up as a bigger photography studio.

AppleRose.

Ha ha, what a silly dream.

We’d revisit the logistics from time to time. These talks were about contracts and agreements and business. They’d go on for days and then just stop. No resolutions. Weeks and months went by. Years went by. We were stuck…on math.

Today, we are not.

Today, it is with as much pride as I can set forth in writing, that I tell you, “Emma’s with us!”

We sat around the table at the studio a few weeks ago and I said, “Steph and I came up with a very specific system to help us stay creative. Check this out…(and I drew a very bad diagram and some stick people).” Emma pulls from her bag, a piece of folded up paper with all kinds of squiggly lines, little diagrams, and pink ink stick people. “Me too,” she said.

Emma’s wedding portfolio is the perfect compliment to what Steph and I do and what we believe wedding photography should be. She’s a multiple award winner with Fearless Photographers, ISPWP + the AG/WPJA but most important, she’s got a style thats all her own. Her storytelling is uncompromising and intentional and like us, she’s never satisfied.

At a recent shoot for a tech company in Cape Breton, I heard the CEO speak to the crowd at the grand opening. “It was music Friday at the office and I shazam’d a song. Someone said, ‘Hey wouldn’t it be cool if you could do that for everything?'” They ran for the white boards and ran with an idea. They created jobs in Cape Breton and they created a technology that will change the way we live. “We didn’t do it because we knew HOW to do it…but we knew we’d figure it out.” This silly dream is now called Slyce.

The hair stood up on the back if my neck. “Holy fucking shit, that’s how I do things too.”  Cameron Chell just blew my mind. I thought back to my high school days when my parents said, “yeah we’re moving to New Hampshire to open a fireplace shop.” I owe much of my ‘ok, lets fucking do this!’ attitude to my parents.

So this is it, this is the idea we talked about for a long time. This is the first step in a bigger plan for Applehead and wedding photography in Halifax. As I sit here and try to type the description of what will happen next, I stall and look for the words. I can simply tell you that I don’t know exactly HOW to do it…but I know we’ll figure it out.

I could not be more proud to add her work to our site. I could not be more proud that she’s proud to put her work on our site. Check out more about Emma, her philosophy and her portfolio here.

I can’t wait to see what happens next!

 

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