Hello From the Other Side

Thank you Orange County; we love you.  The 2016 holiday family portrait season has been the busiest ever at Jack Randall Photography. At times, we had 8 photographers working up to 20 sessions a day at 5 preferred locations across Southern Orange County. During this time, our photography team has handled a massive workload with minimal snags. You should have seen our calendar, it was a color-coded mosaic map! The crazy scheduling (we are all still shaking our head in amazement about how it all came together) required remarkable skills by Nikki, “The great.” She is our studio manager and her superpower is doing 100 things at once while being really nice.

Business is booming

Each one of those family portrait sessions generated an enormous amount of digital images that needed to be formatted and organized as we prepared for the flurry of in-studio picture viewing appointments that were coming our way. (In-studio picture viewing appointments are where clients get to see their pictures and discuss cropping and sizing options for their order.) Electronically placing the print orders is one more task that must be done with great care and detail as many orders have special instructions or finishes. By the time a picture has been through the entire Jack Randall Photography process (scheduled, produced, organized, viewed, processed) it has been handled by all of the staff in some manner. All of this happens against the backdrop of the busy holiday season and the ticking time clock of clients trying to get “last minute scheduled” in time for Christmas gifting.

In the middle of all this work, we had some silly laughs as we navigated though the busiest days of the season. (Did we mention that we moved our studio next door to 34102 Violet Lantern on December 1?) Much like any fun work family, we always have a good time when we are together. One thing our team especially enjoys at this busy time of year is the return of so many familiar faces that we have previously photographed.  It was so nice to see you all and how your kids have grown since last time.

Everyday wasn’t “candy canes and snowflakes,” though. As fate would have it, we had a couple of Murphy’s Law moments that really tested our resilience. No matter what happens around this crazy place, our rule of thumb is very simple; it’s a little thing called The Golden Rule and it leads our intentions in everything we do.

Thankfully, the frazzling pace is finally winding down and the studio will soon return to “normal.” Our pro staff has worked hard to deliver great products to our clients and is looking forward to spending some quality time with their own families. You could say that we are gearing up to put a big red bow on the top of of 2015 and say hello to the adventures that 2016 will bring us (after a little rest, of course.)

…but not so fast. At the end of yesterday, a woman in the middle of an in-studio viewing appointment couldn’t hold back her tears as she viewed the images of her family. As it turns out, most of the team was here in studio to see her touching reaction and she sweetly thanked us all for our work. We don’t often get to see this part of the process. It was in that moment, we all took a deep breath and knew we had really made it to “the other side” once again this year.