Changing Your Name after Getting Married
Welcome back to my weekly blog post! This week we’re talking about the most complicated thing brides must do after getting married, changing their name.
If you’re a bride who just got married, congratulations on getting hitched! That’s so exciting! Marrying your person and blending your lives is the moment you’ve been dreaming of. The first move to blending your lives, besides living together, is taking his last name. This is such a wonderful feeling, you’re getting a new identity and becoming one, but why do they have to make it so complicated?
I recently interviewed a bride in Missoula Montana who recently changed her name, she said it took her about a week to complete everything. It took so long because there were things she didn’t know or couldn't find online when she wasmapping out this process. Like making appointments, not doing walk-ins, or knowing the computer system takes with social security and DMV 24 hours to update your info. So I figured this would be a great topic to address to prepare brides on what to do when you change your name so you won't want to rip your hair out.
This bride said, ‘When you change your name in Montana, you have to change your name first with social security, then you have to wait until the next day or 24 hours before you go to the DMV.’ She recommends making an appointment at Social Security and the DMV for a day shortly after you’re wedding day, but do it like a month before you get married. Or you can try what this bride did. She went to the DMV office first thing in the morning, like try to be the first person in line for walk-ins. She was there around 7:45 am waiting for the office to open at 8 am. She was done and out the door by 8:15 am.
If you live in a big city or heavily populated place, try to make your appointments way ahead of time or try going to a DMV in a smaller town nearby. If you do make an appointment online with the DMV, make the appointment for license replacement because you’re 'making changes to your credentials'. Here are the links for the Social Security Office and DMV in Montana: https://mvdmt.gov & https://www.ssa.gov/.
After those two things are done, you’ll want to change your name on your bank accounts, any loans you have, your bills, insurance policies, and anything related to your work/life. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is. That’s all your subscriptions, mail, anything online, pretty much anywhere you use your name. Granted, some of this depends on what you and your new hubby plan to do with the bills and money, like if you’ll join his policies or not. Definitely a good conversation to have with each other before getting married.
Something you want to practice before getting married is signing your new name. You’ll have to sign a lot of documents with your new name, including your wedding license on your big day, so it’ll really help you out to have that locked down before your wedding.
I guess you’ll want to make appointments everywhere along the way. This bride thought she could simply go to the bank and wait for one of the bankers on the side to help her, but sadly she learned it’s better to make an appointment here too.So when in doubt, make an appointment for everything.
When you go to all these places to change your name, make sure you bring the official copy of your wedding license from the courthouse with you. You’ll need to bring a copy of the paperwork from Social Security, the DMV, to the banks, and possibly with your bills. You’ll need the paperwork from Social Security to get your new ID, then you’ll need your new ID to change your name at the bank. If you want to get a Real ID you need to bring a piece of mail with you to the DMV and some more money. It's free to get a new Social Security card, but it's less than $12 to get your new license if you're paying with a card.
If you want to do something crazy like changing your first name legally from Madelyn to Maddy or Elizabeth to Lizzy, make sure you let the courthouse know when you return your wedding license after it’s been filled out. The bride I interviewed was wanting to change her first name but didn’t know when to bring it up during the process. Somehow Social Security ended up changing her first name like she wanted, and the DMV accepted that she changed her first name, but when she went to the bank she had issues because the change of her first name wasn’t properly documented. Even though both her main forms of identification have her new name on them the bank wouldn’t accept it.
According to the Missoula Courthouse, to open a case on changing your name after it’s been changed you have to fill out a special form from the self-help law office across the street from the courthouse and pay a $120 or $180 fee. She couldn't remember which price it was. Haha. That seems so dumb and pointless that the bank wouldn’t accept it, especially if Social Security and the DMV already accepted it. Changing your first name at the courthouse when you return your marriage license might be easier and, hopefully, cheaper if you do it right away instead of going about it this roundabout way.
One thing this bride might try with the bank is closing her bank accounts and opening new ones with her new name. That way she doesn’t have to go through the headache and financial burden of having to properly document her first name change. She said she’ll let me know how that goes. She’s waiting until she gets the official IDs in the mail before she does this though.
So long story short, if you’re getting married in Montana, make sure you make appointments to change your name at Social Security, the DMV, and banks in advance. After that, you’ll want to change your name on all your accounts, bills, memberships/subscriptions, social media, and anywhere else you have your name. Thankfully, after changing your name at these big places, everything else is tedious yes, but easy to do from the comfort of your phone.
I’m sure changing your name is a slightly different process depending on what state you live in, but this is what it takes to change your name in the beautiful state of Montana. I hope you found this helpful!
What's the Best Time of Day for a Photoshoot?
Oh hello! Welcome back to my blog. I missed a few Sundays because of life things, but things are calming down, so I’m back on the posts! This week, we’re talking about light and when the best time to shoot is, based on the vibe and look you want for your photos.
I’m sure we all know about golden hour, blue hour, and bright mid-day light. If you don't know about those or are a little unsure here’s what they are:
Golden Hour
This is the light when the sun first rises and sets past the horizon. With the sun’s position, the light has a gold color to it and is super soft. Soft light has lighter shadows and isn’t as bright or harsh.
Golden hour is most photographers go to time to shoot. The light is beautiful, the shadows are nice and soft which makes it easier to capture multiple beautiful shots. If you're wanting your pictures to have a more warm, romantic feel to them, golden hour is the perfect time for your shoot.
Blue Hour
This is pretty much at dawn and dusk time of the day before the sun rises and after the sun sets. The light that's still shining on the horizon has a more blue tint to it and is also soft.
Blue hour adds a more edgy, dark kinda vibe to the photos. If you’re wanting your photos to look more moody this light is perfect for that. With there not being as much light out, your photographer may need to use a flash or some type of additive light.
Mid-day Light
This is when the sun is right above us in the sky casting harsh, bright light causing dark, hard shadows. This type of light is usually happening between 11am-6pm, this does vary based on where you live.
In more recent years, more photographers and people are leaning more towards shooting in the bright light. Back in the day photographers would do all they could to avoid shooting in the harsh light. But if the photographer knows what they’re doing and how to shoot in bright light, your pictures could look amazing in this bright light. Or you can always look for a shady spot on a bright, sunny day.
The time of daylight does vary and depends on where you live and the season you’re in. Here in Montana, during the summer our days are so long, literally we have almost 11-12 hours of daylight. Sunrise is a little before 6am and sunset is around 9:30pm, but during winter time the sun doesn’t rise until 8 or 9am and it sets around 4-5pm. That’s only 8-9 hours of light, which is a wild swing of daylight throughout the year.
When you plan out your next shoot, first think about how you want your photos to look or the vibe you want for them. Pinterest is always a great way to get inspiration for how you want your shoot to look or vibe you’re going for. Let your photographer know what you want and make sure they’re okay with it or can do what you want. If you want to shoot in bright mid-day light, make sure your photographer has the skills to do that and is okay with it. If they aren’t okay with it, find a photographer who can do what you want.
Another thing to check or think about when you’re planning your shoot is what the weather will be like. If you’re schedule only allows you to shoot during the middle of the day and you do not want the bright sunny look for your photos, you can plan you’re shoot on a day when it’s going to be cloudy. Clouds act like a diffuser for the harsh light, making it more soft and even distributed. If you want to do golden hour photos, the sunset is so much prettier when there's clouds in the sky. But not too many clouds that it's overcast because that will hide the sunset.
I hope you found this blog post to be helpful in planning your next shoot!
How to be Safe at Your Next Photoshoot
Oh hello! Welcome back to my weekly blog post. I hope you’ve been enjoying this nice weather we’ve been having! Hello sunshine, am I right? Except today is cold and rainy, go figure.
This week's topic might be a little on the dark side and not even a thought you’ve had, but I think it’s important to talk about.I want to touch on the topic of your safety at your next photoshoot-whether that's physical safety, mental safety, or being safe from photographer spammers.
I did a mini shoot last month, my Spring Flower Petites and they were a hit! Almost everyone that inquired with me signed up which was awesome! I did this shoot at my home studio in Huson Montana, which is a pretty small town. All we have is the road and a bar, that’s it. One of my clients that came was a mom and her two sons, one was 11 and the other was 4 or 5 I believe, but it was just the 3 of them that showed up at my house, about 20 minutes out of town, for our shoot. Watching them pull up to my house, the thought totally hit me, that someone could have easily tricked this woman and abducted her and her kids.
Yes, I know that’s a really dark thought, but it’s totally possible. It’s sad to say, but our world is full of crazies that do crazy shit all the time. People get kidnapped all the time. Someone could easily pose as a photographer, get someone to sign up for a shoot at a random location outside of town, and totally use that as a way to kidnap them.
According to Google, ‘In the United States, approximately 206,371 females under 21 and 64,956 females 21 and over are reported missing annually. Additionally, about 460,000 children are reported missing each year’. That’s terrifying. It’s sad, but women unfortunately have to always be on the lookout or high alert anywhere they go, especially going somewhere alone. From watcing Criminal Minds and CSI, I’m always on high alert when I’m out and about. I hate it, it’s probably not helping my anxiety, but I want to be safe out in this crazy world. Which is why I think this topic is something good to cover.
People do pose as fake photographers. I’ve mainly seen this happen as someone posing as a phony wedding photographer. They make themselves look legit online and couples will give them their wedding deposits then the ‘photographer’ ghosts them, never to be heard from again, fucking over that couple.
I’ve also heard of photographers taking nudes or explicit photos of a client and sharing them on porn sites without their knowing. Something to think about when working with a photographer is where they’ll be sharing the photos. Unless it's been talked about with you and the photographer, and the photographer agrees to give you the rights to your photos, the photographer technically has the rights to use them however they want. If they’re a nice person they’ll at least ask you if they can share your pictures and where they’ll share them too, but some aren’t that way. Always check what it says in the contracts, and make sure you agree with it. It’s a fucked up world we’re living in folks.
Some things you can do to ensure you’re safety at your next photoshoot are:
Tell a friend or family member where you’ll be shooting and for how long you’ll be shooting. Better yet, bring a friend or family member with you!
You can share your location with a friend or family member too! My fiance and I use the app Life360 to track each other. This app is nice because it allows iPhones and Androids to track each other.
If you’re able to, do a background check on the photographer.
Stalk the shit outta them online.
Book a video call with them so you can see them in real-time.
If you’re meeting up with the photographer in a random location, either look it up online first or check it out sometime before your shoot, if you have time. There's this app called OnX that shows you who owns what property so you can even look up the owners of the land you’re shooting at if it’s not public land.
You can totally bring a knife, gun, pepper spray, or something you to your shoot.
You can check to make sure someone you know has heard of the photographer you want to work with.
Make sure you talk to your photographer about the rights of your photos and where they’ll be sharing them. Make sure you’re okay with where they want to share your photos. Most photographers have contracts that cover this type of stuff, but you can always make you’re own to send to the photographer if they don’t offer a contract.
If you don’t understand the contract your photographer sent you, Chat GPT and Grok can break it down for you, or if you have a lawyer friend they can look it over for you.
If at anytime during your shoot if you don’t feel safe, stop the shoot and let your photographer know.
I know some of this stuff might be over the top, but from watching Cops and all those Law & Order, CSI shows, you can never be too careful in today’s world. It’s better to protect yourself than to accidentally put yourself in a dangerous situation. It’s like the Boy Scouts say, safety first.
If you found this helpful or if you have any helpful tips you do with staying save at a photoshoot, please let me know!
Have a great week!
What to Wear to a Photoshoot
Spring Flower Petites!
Spring is here! Well, kind of in Montana. The weather here is all over the place. One minute it’s warm and sunny out, the next it's raining, then super fuckin windy and cold. Then before you know it it’s snowing. I know, every state says ‘Just give the weather 5 minutes, it’ll change’, but Montana is really like that.
Even with the weather being all over the place, spring has still sprung! The grass is growing back, the trees and hedges are starting to develop little buds on them. Little flowers are starting to pop up. It’s a magical time of year.
I had this bride come to me with this amazing idea for some spring-themed engagement photos. With all my weddings I offer a free engagement or family shoot to give us a chance to work together. This bride came to me with a great idea to do engagement pictures surrounded by hanging flowers. Thankfully I already had a bunch of fake flowers and set-up my home studio, so I was able to bring her vision to life!
After doing their shoot, I had all those hanging flowers. With this bride's permission, she let me use her idea to do Spring Flower Petites with them! Petites are just like minis, they are a short photo session for a cheaper price, I just gave them a different name to help make them stand out.
I advertised them on my photography Instagram, but once I announced they were open for signups no one hit me up to do them. Dude, it was literally crickets. Haha. God bless Facebook though. I shared these petites on FB Marketplace and in the selling groups and so many people were interested in them! I had 3 shoots this past Saturday and my week is filled with them.
I’m so pumped people signed up for these. It’s so embarrassing when you put a creative idea out there and no one signs up for it. It’s hard to not take it personally.
The setup for this shoot is in my home studio. I did a two-light setup for these shoots. One light (the key light) was in front of the families/couples and I had one pointed on the background of the paper (the fill light) to help with all the shadows from the key light. I’ve been using white background paper with the flowers hanging all over in front of it, but thankfully some people wanted to use colored background paper.
I didn't realize that I was almost out of white paper when I started advertising. Haha. One thing I’m learning with having a studio is that seamless paper gets so dirty! It probably doesn’t help that there is a bunch of dirt around the shop and that my studio is in my fiance's workshop.
I’m figuring out ways to keep the paper clean though. I tried spraying it with this latex finish which made it easier to wipe off some dirt, but it didn't fully keep the dirt off. Last night I spray painted the dirty spots with white spray paint so hopefully that helps make my white paper last until I get my next roll.
I love how the pictures have been turning out though! I hope you guys like the pictures too!
How to Prepare for a Photoshoot
Lights, Camera, Colors!
Hello again!
Thank you so much for checking out my other weekly blog post. Like I said in my first blog, I’ll be sharing two blogs a week, one post will be something about me, the life of a photographer, or the industry, and my other blog post will be about a shoot or wedding I’ve recently shot. Giving information about how the shoot went. As you can guess, this post is about a fun creative shoot I just recently did with my friend Cricket and her boyfriend.
With my fiancé being in the automotive work space, he gets connected or given some pretty sweet car/vehicle type stuff. One thing he was recently given from his work was a box truck. The truck itself doesn’t run, it was given to him with the motor in pieces, but the box part is perfectly fine. We have a flat bed truck already at home that we’re (and by ‘we’re’ I mean mainly him) going to switch the box to.
The plan was when we move to Hawaii we were going to fill the swapped box truck with our stuff and ship it over, but we recently learned that any car or vehicles shipped to Hawaii have to be empty, so that kinda threw a wrench in our plan. We’re still swapping the box over to the flat bed, but until then I’ve been using it for a few creative shoots! Why not use it while it’s just sitting there, right?
A few weeks ago my friend and her bf came out to help me turn the box truck into a colorful rave space to shoot in. We did a couple’s photoshoot and a portrait session. These two brought the space to life with their energy, what they wore, how they posed, and the creative lighting we used. I just loooove how their pictures turned out!
The first shoot was a ‘rave couple’ shoot, which is so fitting for this couple because they love EDM and going to shows locally. I feel like they go to a show almost every week, which hey good for them. For this look they wore these sweet, colorful jerseys her bf had. My friend wore lingerie under her jersey with these badass neon colored boots. Her bf wore shorts and sneakers. For the second half of this session, the couple put on these light-up masks which looked sooo cool! I finally got to use/test the colors of my LED light panels from _____ for this shoot! It was so much fun being able to play around with the light locations and different colors. The box has these panels on the roof that let the natural light in, so we had to cover that with a giant tarp so we could control the lights and see the colors better. We closed the door half way because we were worried we were going to get stuck in there. Haha.
The second concept was an individual, edgy/editorial portrait style shoot with colored lights. My friend changed her makeup and outfit to fit the vibe I had in mind. The setup was somewhat similar to the couples session with using the 2 colored lights, but I lined the walls and floor with thin plastic sheets to help give it a more creative look. I put one of the light panels in the back corner behind the plastic sheet and asked her bf to move the sheet around to give it movement and texture. The other light was in front of her, but off to the side. I kept moving it around while we were shooting. Her pictures turned out sooo fucking cool! It’s really cool having an idea in mind then seeing it come to life, and look even more amazing than I was expecting.
My friend that helped me with these shoots has been into modeling for a while which makes her amazing to work with! She knows how to move her body and use the space, it’s fantastic. We truly create magic every time we work together. She stood in front of the light and just did her thing and she rocked it. She was recently accepted into the Coco Rocha Modeling Camp in New York City! I’m so excited for her, her modeling journey, and to see where modeling will take her.
It’s so cool how something as simple as a empty box truck, some colored lights and amazing talent can create so much life and magic.
