Vancouver Wedding Photographer | Jaylena Photography bio picture
  • Welcome to our Blogsite!

    Hi there and thanks for dropping by!


    This is our little part of the world wide web where we get to enjoy our 15 minutes of fame! ok maybe not, but at least we get to entertain you with some really cool images!


    We are Vancouver-based wedding and lifestyle portrait photographers who have been extremely fortunate not only to have found our soul mates in each other, but also to have discovered that we both share a great passion and a dream of someday doing what we love as a job. Thus JAYLENA Photography was born! 


    We love capturing your heartfelt laughs, great big smiles, shining personalities, and the fun times that you are having in front of our cameras :)


    So kick back, relax and look around! Feel free to leave us a comment, that’s what they’re there for!

    For those of you that like our blog theme, you can save yourself $10 by using the discount code JASOHO937. Check this post for more details!


    In order to contact us, send us an email or use the contact link above.


    You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter!

Under the hood!

Since I have had quite a number of people ask about what we use for our blog theme I thought I’d write this quick post to explain more of the details. The site is powered by Wordpress which I believe is simply the best platform for blogging period. The blog theme we went with is Prophoto Photographer Theme by NetRivet Websites. They have just recently released version 3, which we upgraded to. All I can say about this blog is good things.

As some of you may know, I’m a software engineer by day, and I pretty much build business web applications for a living (in order to pay for the goodies:P). So when I say that the Prophoto blog saved me a bunch of time I really mean it!. Having gone from spending countless hours tweaking a custom Wordpress theme in CSS and PHP, to being able to get our site up from the initial download of the theme to looking pretty sweet in a matter of hours is totally worth the $199!

Now I can focus my time on the more important things in life!

Everything is just laid out in the most intuitive manner from within the Wordpress administrator, and there are a tonne of examples up on the ProPhoto website to help you achieve whatever functionality you like.

Check out the video below for a better overview! Also if you want to save yourself $10 simply use the discount code JASOHO937 at the checkout!


Going Crazy – Vancouver Lifestyle Photographer

Hey guys, week #7 of 2010, so here’s a blog post #7!

Jason switched over to the dark side, but he’s loving it! I’m actually going to let him do a review of his new camera gear since I’m not the techy one; however, I will say this, that Nikon D3s is sexy! It’s got sooo many buttons, so many features, so many options, it’s crazy! Hence when we went for a little walk to test it out, we went a little crazy, and here’s the proof.

Here’s a sneak peak of Jason’s new baby!

Lady in Red – Vancouver Portrait Photographer

First off I want to thank Nick and Deb Beaulieu from The Other Angle Photographer for putting together this shoot at the Ironworks Studio. We had such an amazing time meeting up with some other Vancouver wedding and portrait photographers including Jason Brown, Laura Hana, Jana Frandsen and having an overall blast!  Irina Balykina was one of our beautiful models, and her awesome make up was done by Britt Clancy of Glamourpuss Mobile Makeup. The Ironworks Studio really makes for some gorgeous shots with lots of character. We were able to make use of lots of natural lighting coupled with some great artificial lighting (again thanks to Nick and Jason for brining all their gear!) to get some great shots!. Here are some from the shoot! Enjoy!

These two shots below are processed using some cool textures!

Huge thanks to Jason Brown for setting up the lighting for this shot below! It simply is such an amazing light set up consisting of no less than 5 strobes including one monster ring flash!

February 2, 2010 - 10:35 pm

andrea B - LOVE these you guys! I wish I could have made it :)

February 2, 2010 - 10:48 pm

admin - Thanks Andrea! Hopefully next time your in town we can tee something up! It’s sooo much fun!

February 3, 2010 - 9:31 pm

Elaine G - These are awesome guys! I’ve been looking at ironworks for years now, it looks like it would be a fantastic place to shoot! I esp. like the one with the mirror!

February 5, 2010 - 11:57 am

Laura Hana - Great shots guys! It was so much fun shooting with you two. :)

March 10, 2010 - 6:33 am

Jaylena Photography - Thanks guys!
We need to schedule another studio shoot sometime before wedding season craze sets in! It was a lot of fun photographing with some awesome photogs and beautiful models!

Hanging with The Becker!

Lena and I had been looking forward to this day ever since we registered way back in October last year. For those who don’t know, Christopher Becker, otherwise known as The Becker, is a wedding photographer down in Orange County, USA. He was recently voted as one of the 30 most influential photographers of the decade according to Photo District News. He recently visited Vancouver to hold his workshop over two days.

We had the pleasure of meeting him initially at the SMUG meet and then got the chance to hang out with him afterwards. I never knew someone so famous was so down to earth and full of energy! Having been chatting with him for a an hour or so, he makes you feel like you have known him for a lifetime!

One of the big things that [b]ecker teaches at his workshop is the whole concept of networking with other photographers. This idea hit home with the 80+ attendees as the wedding photography industry has been previously seen to be one of cut throat and intense competition, where photographers were unwilling to share and help out other photographers. In doing so [b]ecker has established the [b] school.com where you can sign up to join a friendly community of thousands of other photographers who are all looking to network with each other.

So back to the workshop. It was held at Miranda and Reilly’s new and gorgeous Blue Olive Studio. Lena and I were given the honour of being [b]ecker’s models for the day when he took us out on a quick photoshoot to show the class how he works.

This day would never have happened without the fabulous work of Tracey Heppner and Michelle Libby (co founders for the Vancouver Wedding Photographers and Second shooters group) for getting off their butts and actually making it happen. Also a big shout out to Tracey’s husband Jonathan Heppner who provided us with a fantastic meal!

Enough talk! here are some pictures! Thanks to Tom Galassi for taking the the shots of us with our camera!

We even got the chance to watch [b]ecker’s live recording of the Study Hall with Jenn and Steve Bebb from Bebb Studios!

January 31, 2010 - 5:56 pm

Miranda - So great to meet you! The [b] shots that went up are super cute – you make fantastic models ;) Cheers!

February 2, 2010 - 3:02 pm

Erin Marie Hall - Oh, you two make such LOVELY models! That workshop looks like it was fantastic, and mannnn it’s so cool you got to gobble up all of [b]’s awesome tips and advice!

February 2, 2010 - 11:01 pm

admin - @Miranda Thank you so much for hosting it!

@ Erin Marie Hall – The knowledge gained from the workshop as well as the “after hours” hang outs with [b]ecker were extremely invaluable!

Graeme’s Birthday – Vancouver Portrait Photographer

Blog post #4, 4th week of January and it was a sunny one! It was also our good friend Graeme’s birthday week, and he wanted to celebrate it doing something outdoorsy with his little family and good friends, followed by a quiet party at home filled with lotsa beers  ;)

We had grand plans to go snowshowing, since it is winter and all and there’s supposed to be snow on the mountains. But we were quite disappointed when we called the local mountains to inquire about snow conditions. There were no conditions, cause there was no snow! hehe I’m just quietly laughing to myself about the snow situation, Winter Olympics are about to start and we have spring temperatures and a bunch of mud on the mountains. Oh well, not my problem really.

Back to our grand plans, we decided that it’d be just as fun to gather up the car full of animals and head to Buntzen Lake for a short little hike. There car was filled with 8 legs, 5 lunches (one extra for good measures), a bunch of water bottles, 12 paws and 3 wagging tails!

First we let the dogs loose in the gated park at the lake, Razor being a crazy water dog swam circles in the water just for fun, he also learned a few new games from a few rambunctious dogs. Gina was going a little nuts trying to get me to throw rocks for her in the water. And Altai being the most mellow out of all the dogs just wandered around and said Hi to all the dogs.

Then we hiked to the other side of the lake, and this is where all the real fun began! Jelena and Graeme had a bright idea to try to make Razor jump off the dock into the water. Poor Razor didn’t know what he was in for! This is how it all went down:

1. Get Razor excited about fetching a stick.

2. Make Razor run after the stick without realizing that there’s an edge to the dock!

3. Laugh really hard once Razor falls in! (Check out Jelena’s head-roll-from-laughing-too-hard!)

4. Poor Razor didn’t know what hit him, and he frantically tries to get back onto the dock. And of course he’s got no leverage, so Jelena goes in for the save, falls on her butt in the process, and gets totally soaked!

After all that, it apparently wasn’t enough, so Graeme goes for attempt #2. But this time Razor isn’t that stupid, and he stops in time to just look at the stick and totally ignore it.

After all the water fun is over, Altai and I play a little tug-of-war. That little bugger is super strong, look at him snapping those twigs!  ;)

Razor joins in the fun! I’ve got nothing against 3 dogs, they beat me pretty quickly.

This concludes our fun on the beach! We headed off back to the car, and we were all pooped! The dogs slept like little babies on the way back home, and we had a nice little nap when we got home too.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRAEME, hope you enjoyed hanging out with us!

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