Today we’d like to introduce you to Joshua Lona and Parisa Maesumi.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Joshua, Parisa. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
We met in 2016 at The University of Texas – Hook ’em! What was meant to be a 1 hour meet up, to discuss a creative project for the organization we met in, quickly turned into 3 hours. Maybe 20 minutes of which were spent talking about the project. Six months later, we had shot a handful of weddings and spent a few evenings a week discussing ideas for growing our new business. Our admiration for each other grew, and we would come to learn later that a lot of our mutual friends were secretly, and some not so secretly, seeing our chemistry and waiting for the day we’d become a couple.
That moment came almost six months later. It was a chilly October evening and Josh was walking me out to my car. It was one of those times when you’re supposed to say goodbye but the next thing you know two hours have passed, you’ve still got so much to talk about, the temperature around you has fallen 10 degrees but you don’t notice – and for some reason, you can’t get yourself actually to say goodbye and turn around and walk away because you could talk endlessly with the person in front of you. And I guess in the circumstances like that eventually your feelings for each other are bound to come out, right? As they say, the rest is history!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The question we’ve been asked countless times is, “How do you run a business as a couple?” usually followed by why it would be hard for the person asking the question to ever work with their significant other. This has not been a major challenge for us, but we do like to joke that you get double the problems to solve. Lol! Our biggest challenge has been questioning this career path as full-time wedding professionals. As Univ. of Texas graduates in Computational Biology (Parisa) and Economics (Joshua), there were a bunch of different career paths we could have taken, but we decided on this one. Starting a business out of college is risky when you have so much momentum to pursue pre-determined career paths, you know they will likely lead to a great salary, benefits, and a somewhat clear trajectory for life. Over time our passion for our work has only grown and watching our business grow along with it has been an incredibly rewarding experience to share that is the most priceless experience we’ve shared as a couple.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
We’re a wedding photography and videography company focused on serving couples who are down-to-earth, authentic, and joyful. For photography, we specialize in a candid approach that we use to bring the joy out of our couples’ wedding days by capturing things as they happen and prompting them with creative ideas to squeeze all of the goodness out of their wedding day. We love candid portraits that show the full range of personalities of our couples. Getting to know our couples is at the heart of what we do. That allows us to work with couples to represent who they are in their images truly.
For videography, we use the same approach! Our films are a blend of romance and the excitement of a wedding day in our films. In our pre-production process, we take a look at our notes from our conversations with couples and create an outline using their timeline for their wedding highlight film. We enjoy having discussions with couples about how they want their film to make them feel, what’s most important to them on their wedding day, and how they’d like us to balance the excitement and romance in their film.
As a company, we’re most proud of 2 things: our customer experience and our artwork. Our customer experience includes quick email responses, timeline assistance, an engagement and wedding planning guide, phone calls, coffee dates, happy hour meet-ups, and a feeling that you’re working with another couple who cares deeply about the success of your wedding day. Our artwork includes a full-range of heirlooms for couples to choose from to decorate their homes with wall art and albums from their sessions and wedding day with us. We are especially proud to say that each wedding we shoot is better than our last because we have high attention to detail and an unending drive to improve and become two of the best photographers and filmmakers in the world. We’re just getting started!
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
Our wedding plans are to grow our business into multiple team members so that we can reach more couples with our work. We love to teach our craft to young aspiring creatives who have the same passion that we do in telling the stories of a wedding day. In the future, we plan to expand into shooting luxury and high-end real estate projects. We love residential real estate and the idea of shooting resorts and hotels around the world. We’re working on creating this new line of business right now! It’s coming soon!
Pricing:
- Wedding Photography Base Package • 6 Hours of Coverage • One Photographer (Parisa!) • Timeline Planning • Online Image Gallery • 10×10 Fine Art Album (Pictured Below) & 25 Image Credit • Wedding Album Design Consultation $2500
- Wedding Videography Base Package • 6 Hours of Coverage • One Videographer (Joshua!) • Highlight Film (4 mins) • Instagram Sneak Peek Drone Footage • Films Hosted Online + Downloadable $2500
Contact Info:
- Website: https://joshuaandparisa.com/
- Phone: 2108724257
- Email: hello@joshuaandparisa.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshuaandparisa/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/joshuaandparisa
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/joshua-and-parisa-wedding-photo-and-video-austin
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