Christine Meintjes, my favorite wedding photographer, came to the States for a few weeks and I got to meet her last night! I’ve been following her blog for months and months and have never seen a picture I didn’t like. I love her style, personality, framing, processing… everything! She’s given me lots of good advice in the past and is so encouraging. It doesn’t hurt that she’s from beautiful South Africa!

Her and her boyfriend, Iaan, had been hanging out with Henry Chen and his girlfriend, Nancy, and Edmund Prietos. Matt and I met up with them at Henry’s studio in Long Beach (hoping to “borrow” the pic from Christine!) and drove down to Las Brisas in Laguna Beach for dinner.

It feels like the market is saturated with photographers and, honestly, not all photographers seem unique to me. There are days that I’m gung ho on working towards being professional but there are other days where I feel like I’ll be lucky to ever book anything! I was saying last night that I’d like to go pro and ended with a shrug of my shoulders. One of them said, “A lot can happen in a year. You look back and can’t believe all that’s happened.” They are doing it and were encouraging me to press on. It was wonderful! I’m grateful for them and can’t wait to continue learning more about the biz!

Regarding the title of this post… we had a long conversation about languages and were told that ‘thank you very much’ in Afrikaans sounds like an American saying ‘buy a donkey’. Hah!