Happy Easter

Hello All,

Just a quick post today as I haven't written in a while. 

Things this end are all gearing up for another very busy wedding season which starts this month and goes right the way through to the end of December!

We are currently looking at some new suppliers we saw at a photographic convention recently (Focus last month) who look like they'll be able to supply us with a gorgeous range of new products (watch this space for an announcement on them soon) which will fit in perfectly with our existing range.  We're also working on other bits and pieces for the website (which always takes longer than I think) and hopefully those updates will be ready soon as well.

In the meantime, whilst I'm not writing on here so frequently David and I just wanted to wish you all a very Happy Easter - enjoy the long weekend

x

Happy 40th Birthday Rachel!

Happy 40th Birthday Rachel - you don't look a day over 39 (just teasing, you look a lot younger than your age).

Thanks for being a wonderful sister-in-law to me (and sister to David). We're so glad we could share in your celebrations and the 80's disco night was fab.  Hope we didn't make it onto you tube with all our crazy dancing - who'd have thought I'd learn the timewarp at this age!

Looking forward to seeing you all soon

xxxxxxx

Happy 60th Birthday Pat!

To my loveliest (and one of my best friends) Pat, I'm so glad we got to share your 60th Birthday with you. 
We had a wonderful time - good friends, good food and lots of laughs
Here's to many more happy get togethers and celebrations - hope to catch up again very soon
xxx

The unexpected arrival of Walter!

Isn't it weird how sometimes things just happen that you're not expecting at all.  

Walter is one of those things that happened to us in the last few weeks. 

Sadly at the end of June David's grandmother passed away - we rushed down to Brighton to see her but she died just before we arrived.  We then stayed with the family for a few hours before travelling back up to Suffolk.  When we were about 20 minutes away from home we were diverted as the road was closed for road works.  On our way down all these little windy roads David insisted the TomTom was wrong and we take a different route.  After a traumatic day I just went along with him and followed his instructions (which is rare for me so I must have been tired!).  Then about 10 minutes away from home (at midnight) I saw this tiny little cat in the middle of the road - I slammed on the brakes and didn't hit anything (at this stage after a very long day David thought I was hallucinating!) so reversed back a tiny bit so we could see with the headlights and there in the middle of the road was a tiny kitten.

I got out and went over to it - it was cold, meowing and there was no sign of houses or a mummy cat anywhere nearby.  So I did what any plonker would do and decided to take it home.

We got home and then frantically googled how old the cat must be (estimating 3 to 3 and a half weeks old) - either way it was way too little to be without a mummy cat.  In the early hours of the morning now and after reading lots of advice (and no one being available until the next morning) we just kept cuddling him to keep him warm (as they can't regulate body temp until 5-6 weeks) and tried to drip feed him a solution of sugar and water to keep him temporarily alive!.  This meant neither of us went to sleep but thankfully he survived the night and in the morning we took him to the vets to get some cat replacement milk so we could feed him.  Here's a couple of photos of him that morning after his first milk feed.

Now I feel like we can safely say we have a tiny snap shot into the life of new parents and know a little how you feel (and it's completely knackering) as Walter (he needed a name and I don't know why but he just looked like a Walter to me) now needed constantly to be kept warm and fed every two hours!!!!  Thankfully I have a heaven sent sister-in-law (Rachel) who helped us by taking Walter on days and nights we couldn't have him otherwise I don't think we could have managed.  

Thankfully though after a few little hiccups (like Walter having a throat and chest infection) Walter is thriving.  In these photos he's about 5-6 weeks old 

David obviously was tired and needed a cat nap too!

We tried our best to get Pip (our dog) to accept Walter so we could keep him but she wasn't having any of it (she is far too protective of David and didn't want Walter anywhere near him) and so Rachel (who loves him just as much as we do) is keeping him (he'll now be living with her husband and children, two other cats, a dog and chickens!)  It was very hard to reach the decision of not keeping him (although best for Walter as we couldn't have lived with ourselves if Pip had attacked/eaten or killed him) as we both fell completely in love with him in just a few days.  However, we know he will be loved and cared for at Rachel's and have the perfect home there (plus we'll still get to still see him lots) with loads of outdoor space and no nearby busy roads!

Walter came for his last stay with us a couple of days ago and is growing rapidly.  When we first picked him up he weighed 305g and now is pushing the kitchen scale limits at over 900g!  He is growing into a very handsome (and a naughty, playful and mischievous) little cat.  Here are our most recent photos of him

I took Walter in the garden for a couple of photos (but didn't pop him down as I would have liked to for a few photos in the flowers and trees as he hasn't had his inoculations yet so if you're reading this Rachel please don't worry!)

As you can see Pip (our dog) looks at him like he's dinner!!!!!

I'll keep blogging on Walter when he gets a little older and hopefully more photos will follow so you can see how much he's grown.

Right, back to work now!  I'll write over the next few days on weddings, parties, portrait sessions etc that we've also been up too during the past few very hectic weeks!

Electricity off tomorrow - 17th June

Hey all,

Just a note to let you know that we are without electricity most of tomorrow (17th June) so the answer machine will not pick up any calls.  If you need me urgently please call my mobile (please be aware that the mobile has an awful signal here so will send you straight to the answer machine on that most of the time but I will call you back as soon as I can if you leave me a message). 

All e-mails will be picked up tomorrow evening when hopefully everything will be restored!

Thanks for your understanding in advance

Time for a revamp and a new look blog for the summer!

Call off the search parties ..... lol.....I am still here for all of you who've noticed that I haven't blogged in a while.  I've just been incredibly busy recently but that shouldn't be an excuse as I know a lot of you love reading this and seeing what we've been up to.  I'll write up some recent weddings and portraits over the next few days and I'll try to also pop a few of our holiday snaps on here as well for you to have a nosey at.

I thought it was about time I gave the blog a bit of a refresh so I hope you like the new look - comments are always welcome :-)

I'm also in the process of updating all the galleries on the website so some new images should be appearing very soon (I'll let you know when they're on the site)

Congratulations to my little (and only) sister and my new brother-in-law!

I almost can't believe that my little sister is now a married lady!!!!!!  This is our first wedding of the year and one where I had to be a bridesmaid rather than the photographer!  As we always post our weddings I thought it might be nice for you all to look at us as guests - boy was it different being part of the wedding rather than photographing (give me a camera any time - it's far less stressful!)

Here's a couple of photos - we only took our 'point 'n' shoot' little camera to stop us going into photographer mode!

Here's one of just me and my sister (yes it was a little cold but thankfully it was very sunny for 2nd April!)

Here's the six of us (my dad, mum, Joe (Sarah's husband), my sister (Sarah), Me and David (my husband)

During the dancing I stood behind mum and dad and got this lovely one of Sarah and Joe's first dance

We had a lovely day and enjoyed all the dancing in the evening - it was lovely to see lots of friends and family who we hadn't seen in a while to catch up.  We can't wait to see the official photos soon

With all our love to Sarah and Joe who we wish nothing but happiness for

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Back up and running

After a very hectic couple of weeks we have successfully moved and as of a couple of hours ago are back up and running on the internet as well.

Our new contact details are as follows:

Hayley Denston Photography
Waveney Cottage
Queen Street
Stradbroke
Eye
Suffolk
IP21 5HG

Tel: 01379 388436

We have written to all our current clients who have booked and will try to get our details amended on all the various websites asap.

Hope everyone is enjoying this glorious sunshine.  I'll try to write up some stories soon once I've caught up on everything!

Hayley Denston Photography Website revamped and relaunched!

We've been on our hols and are now back refreshed, recharged and ready to go! Looking forward to the next wedding already. Obviously, we have returned to loads of work, enquiries etc - we will get back to everyone as soon as we can.

Some good news on our return is that our New Website is now up and running. There are a few tweaks that need to be made but in general it is a big step up from the old site. We now have a slideshow which runs continuously on the Home Page - it was really hard to choose photos for the website as we have so many that we love. We therefore made the decision to choose our images from last year and this year (apart from the odd couple of
images) as this best reflects our current work and where we are at.

We now have an up-to-date About Us section which tells you a little more about us (and a photo as someone pointed out to me that we weren't on the old site!). We have a Wedding and a Portrait section to tell you a little more about what we do whilst the Galleries section shows you a small selection of our work. We've broken the galleries down into some pretty general catergories. Some of the photos therefore didn't fit into the section descriptions perfectly (we worked out we'd have needed over 20 galleries to accommodate all the different headings we
thought of) but we've included them anyway!

The Proofs section replaces the old 'your album' section but still goes through to all your albums that have been uploaded recently. This section is currently being redesigned to fit in with the new site - please be patient if it doesn't look perfect at the moment!

We have a completely new section called Reviews where we have just a small selection of the testimonials we received last year. We will still write up new testimonials on here and will add to this section on the site periodically. We get so many lovely e-mails and cards and we are grateful for all of them so if yours hasn't made it to this section this time round it may just appear in the future and has certainly been kept.

Other than that we still have a Links section which gives a list of other suppliers such as venues we've worked at and we've kept our Contact section so you can get in touch.

We hope that you all get the chance to look at the revamped site - as it is still in the early stages any comments you wish to make would be greatly appreciated so that we can update and tweak it to make it as perfect as possible. If you do want to comment please either add a comment on the blog here or e-mail me.

I could talk about the new site for pages but must get on with catching up on work. I'll write again very soon as I have several outstanding weddings to write up on here and a whole load of testimonials to add that we received whilst we were away. Hope you all manage to get out and enjoy some of this glorious sunshine this weekend :)

Apologies for not being in the office most of this week

Just a quick note to let you know why I haven't been around if you have e-mailed or been in touch this week. Unfortunately at the beginning of the week my dad was taken very poorly with breathing difficulties and taken into hospital. This has meant that I have been away from the office until today so there has been a bit of a delay to all current work which is loads at this time of year. Thankfully, my dad is now out of hospital and slowly recovering from what they believe to be a very nasty viral infection. I am now working my way through a large backlog of work and will do my best to be up-to-date again over the next couple of week's (fingers crossed and all being well).

Apologies to those of you whose meetings I have had to rearrange at short notice and thanks for your understanding.

Calendar Shoot

This week I was asked to do something a little different and did my first charity calendar. It's to help raise money for Saplings Pre-School in Bottisham, Cambridgeshire and involved lots of nice dad's having their photographs taken with not a lot on (only in some cases did they take off most of their clothes and nothing seedy at all!) All of them were very co-operative and a pleasure to photograph. I'm currently working on their images and will be sending them something shortly. I wish them lots of success in raising plenty of money from the finished calendar.