Category Archives: miscellaneous

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Announcing: Summer 2010 Boudoir Marathon

phoenix boudoir photography by Jeanette LeBlanc

It’s all about feeling beautiful.  Feeling powerful.  Feeling sexy.  Stepping into yourself as a woman and being confident enough to own your sensual, sexual, divine, goddess self.

It can be raw and real, soft and pretty, raunchy and racy, bold and artistic. It can be red patent leather heels and black fishnet stockings, or it can be saucy 1940′s pin-up.  You can be feminine and innocent in lacy pastels, or rock out your inner biker chick with a leather vest and bad-ass boots.   You can be perfectly beautiful everyday you, or you can channel that inner rockstar who has been patiently waiting for just the right opportunity to show herself.  Silverscreen glamor girl or downtown diva.  Fredrick’s of Hollywood or La Perla?  Artsy, grainy black and white?  Bright, vibrant, rich color?   All of the above?  You decide.

Tuck your boudoir album into your husband’s suitcase to surprise him on a long business trip.  Gather your besties with lots of giggles and a bottle of champagne for courage and toast your fabulous single life. Give your girlfriend an anniversary gift she’ll always remember.  Keep your images under your pillow and pull them out when you need a reminder of just how fabulous and incredible you really are.

Yes, right now you might be nervous.  You might feel intimidated.  You might be thinking that you just need five fewer pounds or perkier boobs, or a just a little less muffin top.  You might be focused on all the things that you’ve always told yourself need fixing.  And that makes sense.  We don’t live in a world that celebrates real women.

But guess what, your boudoir session is about celebrating you.  Perfectly real, perfectly fabulous, perfectly perfect YOU.

Yes, we’ll make sure you have the perfect outfits, and a divine hair and make-up artist to make you red-carpet ready.  We’ll take care of booking a uber-cool hotel room to provide a stylish backdrop, and you’ll get a sexy little album with some killer photographs.  But in the end, the one thing that will make this a day you’ll always remember is how you feel when you walk away.

I guarantee that we’ll make you comfortable.  We’ll make you laugh.  We’ll make you see yourself in a whole new light.  I promise you’ll leave feeling beautiful and powerful and sexy beyond belief.

Your boudoir session can be whatever you want it to be – because it’s all about you.  Your comfort level.  Your style.  Your beauty. Your amazing, awe-inspiring self.

Trust me.

{We’re in the early stages of planning our very first Boudoir Marathon for September of 2010. Along with hair and makeup artist Meghan Reese, we’ll be booking a limited number of boudoir sessions at one of Phoenix’s top hotels over a two-day period in early September. Sign up below to be added to our mailing list and get priority placement and an exclusive bonus when we open up for booking}

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Love Note Revolution | Part Two

I asked for a revolution – yes I did.  So, perhaps we’re not  yet at the place where we  qualify as a full-fledged revolution.  These things take time.  At the very least I’ve seen the beginnings of a warm-fuzzy-mushy-gushy love fest.  A miniature uprising of sappy sincerity.  A plethora of creative and inspiring messages of love, love, love.

Ummmm….it makes me feel all floaty and melty and goooood….

I received emails, I got tweets, I got pics of text messages, even a screen capture of a Facebook status update. Ya’ll aren’t shy when it comes to professing your amorous side.  At the risk of overusing a word – I LOVE it!

For the next little while I’ll try to do a post every few days with the love notes that are trickling in.  Once they start to come in waves (and I’m fully confident that they will) I’ll figure out a more manageable solution.  No matter what, I promise to share the love.

After all, just like the Beatles told us, it’s all we really need.

Phoenix Photographer Jeanette LeBlanc collects love notes

San Diego photographer Shawn Houllis tagged me on facebook with this awesome iphone text thread between her and her love

Love note collected by Phoenix Wedding Photographer Jeanette LeBlanc

But perhaps even better than this, is the love letter Shawn recently wrote to herself and posted on her own blog, together with the most beautiful photos of her very real, fabulously beautiful, utterly lovely self.  If only all of us could find the courage to open ourselves and transmit that much love to the bodies we have, that serve us every day of our lives.  This particular love note is a testament to the journey of a phenomenal women just beginning to get a glimpse of the goddess within.   If this isn’t a love note, I don’t know what is.

Once some people feel the love, they are unstoppable!  To start with, Fairbanks Alaska photographer Chelsey Mach didn’t write a love note, she picked one.  A beautiful bouquet of love for her husband (yes, even the men-folk among us deserve flowers every now and then).  Although the lilacs in the vase didn’t get photographed, she sent me a photo of the source.

In addition to the beautiful purple blooms Nicole also sent along another love note to daddy – top scribbles by the 4 year old, bottom scribbles by the 2 year old and translation by Mama!

And, to totally melt me, she sent in a picture of their garden, and explained that it was a labor of love for her children.  A piece of the “love pie” she called it.  I can’t think of anything more loving than digging in the dirt and cultivating something that will nourish your children.  I firmly believe that food grown with love just tastes better.

More to come darlings – I promise!

Contact Form Errors

I just wanted to post a quick note to let everyone know that I have been experiencing errors with my contact form over the last week or so.  I have received several inquiries, but they are coming through without contact information attached.  If you have attempted to get in touch with me via my contact form, please resend your inquiry via email to info@jeanetteleblanc.com

Sorry for any inconvenience!

Jeanette

Recent Weddings Slideshow | Phoenix Wedding Photographer

Jeanette LeBlanc Photography | Recent Weddings from Jeanette LeBlanc on Vimeo.

I have had the pleasure of providing wedding photography and bridal sessions to brides and grooms in several amazing wedding venues.  As you can see from the images, I have been blessed with some spectacularly beautiful couples and some amazing locations in Phoenix and Flagstaff.

Featured Vendors Include:

Venues:

The Boojum Tree – Phoenix

The Nordic Center -  Flagstaff

Flowers:

The Garage by Ivy

Endearing Floral Design @ Thee Wedding Warehouse

Dresses:

Jennyvi Dizon

Jewelry:

Two Sisters Jewelry Boutique

Hair/Makeup:

Tina Burnham

Joe Buissink | A night of inspiration

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing master photographer Joe Buissink speak at the local Pictage Users Group meeting here in Phoenix.  It may be rather cliché to fall back on a Jerry Macguire-esque ‘he had me at hello’,  but when you open with a line like this…

“The most important thing about your photography is who you are.”

…you’ve got to know I’m going to be leaning forward in my seat and hanging on every word.

It was inspirational from start to finish.  This is a man who didn’t even start taking pictures until he was 44, and is now one of the biggest in the business (we’re talking a wedding clientele that includes J. Lo, Christina Aguilera, et al). He left a high powered corporate job to chase a dream and he’s a walking advertisement for living with passion.

I found myself scribbling in a little notebook all night, even when the lights were out during his slideshows, trying to record all the little bits of wisdom that flowed out of him during the presentation.  Here (roughly paraphrased) are just some of the quotes…

…You leave a piece of yourself in every image you take.  Take your favorite photos – the ones that really move you – into a quiet room and study them, FEEL them until you see yourself in the images and understand why you took them…

…When I’m at a wedding, and I’m feeling myself getting bored because I know what is going to come next and I’ve seen it a hundred times before (he says his vows, she gets teary eyed, click, click, click) I force myself to turn around.  I’ve trained myself to see the same thing over and over again, so I have to train myself to see something different.  I turn around, and then I see an entirely different, beautiful moment…

…Function from a place of passion, not paycheck.  Tap into that passion and your work will soar…

…We get stuck in boxes we build for ourselves, allow yourself to play and experiment to break out of those boxes ..

…My camera is an extension of my arm and heart and eye, it’s almost like a paintbrush to me…

…When I see a moment but I don’t have my camera, I slap my leg and then snap my finger – what I’m doing is training my brain to capture those moments so that when I do have my camera, it will be automatic…

…I don’t shoot for my clients, I shoot for me.  I only show what I love, so by the time they hire me we are already on the same page…

…There are moments to shoot that are THE moment, and then there are the moments between moments…those are what I look for…

…The simplest and easiest thing you can do to get your clients to show you beautiful emotions?  Ask them how they feel right now. Then start shooting…

…There is no such thing as a perfect image, only a perfect moment…

…If your dream is elusive, hunt it down.  Go after it.  With all you can gather, go after it…

He also talked a lot about using your photography to give back to the community, highlighting his own work with Autism (he has two children on the spectrum) and Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep.  He encouraged everyone to seek out opportunities to get involved in work with a deeper meaning, speaking from the heart about how it has the potential to really expand your own body of work and the way you see the world.

Near the end of the night, when he was speaking about his wedding business, he told a story about how he prequalifies his clients by asking where they are getting married and how many guests are attending.  Depending on their answers he knows if they are likely to be able to afford him (Beverly Hills Hotel with 300 guests?  Check.).  But then he spoke about how important it is to him not just that a client can pay for his work, but that they *get* his work on a soul level.   How he actually structures his weddings so that he hires another photographer to be the primary shooter and he is officially the second shooter, so that all he does is shoot what he loves, what moves him, the moments he sees that others miss.

Shoot what you love.  Advice does not get much more simple, or much more powerful than that.

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And because no post is complete without a picture, here is a recent image that I feel deeply, not because it’s a perfect, award winning image, but just because it’s her…

Phoenix Children's Photography

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