Today's Guest: Mel Englander of Englander Photography in Davie, Florida
Today's Host: John Bentley
July 2007
Listen to this Show
Publish this Show on Your Website
Show Sponsor www.morephotos.com
Mel Englander
Mel Englander Transcript Page
Mel Englander Expert PageANNOUNCER: Welcome to the VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight with your host, John Bentley.
JOHN: Today's program is sponsored by morephotos.com the online photo sales solution to professional photographers worldwide.
JOHN: Today we are in the Studio with Mel Englander of Englander Photography of Davie, FL. Welcome to VTalk Radio's Photographer's Spotlight, Mel.
MEL: Thank you.
JOHN: What's going on down there in Florida? You got a little business going on, tell us a little bit about it.
MEL: Well, we've been quite busy. We've been in business down here for 22 years in Florida, specializing in wedding photography, Bar Mitzvah's, Quince portraits; keeping quite busy. We're a family business that originally started in 1960 in Brooklyn, NY, by my father, Sid Englander. His business name was Englander Studios, and we're continuing the quality work that my father started back then.
JOHN: I see that weddings are probably a big part of your business. Tell us a little bit about the wedding photography business.
MEL: Well, we do wedding photography and we do very personalized work for our brides and grooms. We really make sure that every wedding that we cover is done as if it was our own wedding and how we'd want to have it handled. We sit down and have consultations to make sure that the type of work, the type of pictures they want is done their way. We're really very much into having a personal relationship with our clients for our weddings. We do the same thing with our Bar and Bat Mitzvah's. We do Quinces which also is a very beautiful event for girls turning 15 and not to mention, we do quite a few family portraits and executive portraits and we cover corporate events from all major corporations from Coca-Cola, Fortune 500 companies down to small corporate events.
JOHN: Now are you documenting these corporate events or are you actually doing like still photography like for a business cards and things like that.
MEL: Well we're documenting corporate parties. We do a lot of on site printing which something we do at weddings, Bar Mitzvah's also, where we take pictures of individuals as they come in and actually print them on site for the clients. We print them up and usually put them in folders for them. We have a whole division where we do such things as take the photos and put them onto ceramic mugs. We put them into key chains, snow globes, all various types of products for the corporate events. In addition to doing photography for their websites, product photography. We also have a division, you know with on site printing, called fun photo booth where we actually bring an old fashion photo booth out to weddings, corporate events, Bar Mitzvah's where people can sit in there, have a strip of 4 photos taken, have it come out from the old fashion photo booth. That's another part of what we're doing.
JOHN: That sounds like a lot of fun.
MEL: It is. We really enjoy what we do. I have a wonderful staff here. I have full time graphic designers and retouchers. We have our own on site digital lab which most studios do not have. We print everything on site. We laminate everything. We can print up to 44" wide here at our studio which enables us to give the best quality possible and have a very quick turn around time on our photography. And everything that we do goes through our graphic design department which is retouched and enhanced before anything goes out, because we have our name on everything that goes out so we want to make sure that we get the customer the best possible quality.
JOHN: It sounds like when you do a wedding or a corporate event, you got quite an entourage with you. How big is the crew that you take out to these kind of things?
MEL: It really varies on the event and the size of the people. We've had events where we've had as many as 5 - 6 people, but most of them I would say are generally 1 or 2 people for the photography. Now in addition to the photography, we also have a video production department where we videotape all the events that we do. The video department we now just started to do high definition video taping. Everything is done on premise. My background in video...I majored in television production, I have a Tele Award and I worked for Steven Spielberg for the Shower Foundation for three years doing video taping and documenting for the Shower Foundation so, we have an award winning video crew to supplement our photography we do here.
JOHN: Tell me a little bit about the Tele Award. What exactly was that for?
MEL: Well, the Tele Award is a very prestigious award that was for editing that I received in 1996. It was for the editing that I did on a video for Sports Aerobics called "Excelling to the Gold" for Mission Sports where it was for children's aerobics. It teached children and young adults how to exercise and for stretching so that they would be more limber and safer and have less injuries. And I had been involved in many corporate and industrial videos over the years, and I'm also the founding president of the Florida Event Photography Association which is a group of videographers that video tape events such as weddings and Bar Mitzvah's and it's still flourishing. It's an organization that I started 12 years ago and it's still flourishing till this day. Not to mention in my photography, I'm also a former board member of the Professional Photographers Guild of Florida which is the local association of the Professional Photographers of America which I served on the board several years ago.
JOHN: That's a good organization to be a part of. It definitely shares with your customer base the kind of quality photographers that you work with.
MEL: Well, we belong to many associations such as WPPI which is the Wedding Portrait Photographer Association, Digital Wedding Forum, National Association of Photoshop Professionals. The one thing that I've always believed in, and my father believed in, is continuous education, and we're always learning cutting edge techniques and in photography, video, editing and retouching. I like to keep up. I like to have the latest type of still sets for myself and my photographers to make sure that we really provide the client with the best possible photography because we really refer to photography as an art form here, rather than just wedding photography. We're not your typical photographers. We really do a couple of things. One, we like to create an incredible memory for the people and an incredible experience when we do their photography because if they don't have a great experience and the photography is really not worth much, and the other thing is we want to have them have beautiful photographs that they can be proud of and want to show throughout their lifetime because we are creating lifetime memories here. So we really take it very seriously and make sure that we deliver more than what we promise, because our whole customer base is referral. We do not advertise. We do not do bridal shows. Our entire business is through word of mouth.
JOHN: Speaking of advertising, why don't you tell our listening audience what your website and contact information is.
MEL: Yes. The website is www.englanderphotography.com. I tell people that Englander is very simple like the country England with an "er" at the end and photography.com and if you go online we have our company history there. We have portfolios. We also will post our events password protected events so that only people with password can view the events. We invite people to come in and have a no obligation appointment to be able to view the work that we have and get to meet us and see what we're all about.
JOHN: Hey, Mel, what's your phone number?
MEL: It's (954) 434-1321 and I'm located at 8238 Griffin Road, Davie, FL, which is a part of Ft. Lauderdale.
JOHN: We are speaking with Mel Englander of Englander Photography of Davie, FL. You are listening to VTalk Radio's Photography Spotlight. We'll be right back after these important messages.
ANNOUNCER: Looking for a bridal show in your area? Visit www.weddingdetails.com for a list of upcoming bridal shows in your area. Visit www.weddingdetails.com tonight.
VTALK RADIO: VTalk Radio.
ANNOUNCER: This VTalk Radio Spotlight is sponsored by morephotos.com, the online photo sales solution to professional photographers worldwide.
ANNOUNCER: We now return you to the VTalk Radio Photographer's Spotlight with your host, John Bentley. JOHN: You're listening to VTalk Radio Photographer's Spotlight. We're in the studio today with Mel Englander of Englander Photography of Davie, FL. Welcome back to the program,Mel.
MEL: Thank you.
JOHN: Now, Davie, Florida, I'm a little unfamiliar with the area. Can you tell us some of the communities and surrounding cities you cover down there?
MEL: Yes, well Davie is a suburb just west of Ft. Lauderdale so we're pretty much part of the greater Ft. Lauderdale area, although the majority of our clientele is from south Florida including Dade County, Brower County and Palm Beach. We do travel nationally and internationally. We've done many weddings down in Jamaica, Bogata, Columbia, Panama. We've done quite extensive traveling doing weddings throughout the United States, because we were established for so long in New York, we still have many clients up there. So traveling is not an issue. The thing I always tell people, have camera, will travel. We do cover people who want our services pretty much most of the United States.
JOHN: Now, obviously you have a studio. What about other wedding facilities that you like to use in the area?
MEL: Well we do on location. That's where most of our photography is done. We have some of the top venues in south Florida that recommend us such as Westin Hills Country Club, Grand Oaks Country Club, Renaissance Hotels, and many, many others that have recommended us over the years.
JOHN: Let's talk about products. What about some of the products you're offering through your photography business. Photo albums, or are you doing other things like, imposing peoples pictures on mugs or t-shirts or anything like that? What's going on?
MEL: Well yes, with our photo albums that we do, we offer coffee table albums which are very popular today. Coffee table albums are custom design albums where our graphic designers actually overlay and put multiple photographs together in them. But unlike most other photography studios that use software that you know pretty much use generic templates to put them together, we custom design everything with our graphic artists. We will sit down with the client, find out the feel, the elegance, or the theme that they have that they would like to be able to show off in their album and make sure every album that we do is individually designed. No cookie cutters over here. We offer more traditional albums, we have albums now where we can print on metallic papers, water color papers. One of the newest things is, we do albums in all black and white. We're doing portraits with water colors, and just some really unique stuff that's different than the ordinary so that people can really enjoy it. We do canvas and the like. In addition to that, we also have our full video production that we offer some really unique styles of video taping and we have our whole division of on site printing where we actually print photographs on site for people in various forms such as photographs and folders, photos on mugs. We offer them in snow globes, and we also have the newest device which is the old fashion photo booth that we actually bring out on location. So people can really enjoy their photography, the wedding day, and have a unique keepsake and not only do the guests get a strip of photos, but the client also gets a scrapbook with a copy of everyone's photos so they can see the fun that everybody had at their wedding.
JOHN: Now it sounds to me like you're doing primarily digital photography. Are you still doing any kind of film photography?
MEL: Well we haven't used film here in probably over 7 years now. Everything is totally digital. Absolutely love it.
JOHN: Certainly makes it easy. And like you said, with your online printing, your customers can see and get prints the same day.
MEL: Well it also allows us to give a better quality to the client which is really the thing that we always look for. We can do better for the clients. All around, digital has really been a blessing, and we really enjoy it.
JOHN: Now obviously you're customer satisfaction is probably your most important goal. Is that the case, or is there any other goals that you have when you're doing a photo session?
MEL: Well customer satisfaction is obviously the most important thing to us. One of the examples to that is we will always insist on doing an engagement session with each bridal couple for two reasons. One, we give them a beautiful portrait that they can display at their wedding, but more important than that, we want them to get to know us and have a level of comfort at their wedding when we're photographing them so that it's not the first time they're interacting with myself or one of my photographers. We want them to get to know us and have a nice rapport going, because like I mentioned earlier...to us it's not just the photography it's also the experience of people having a fantastic experience having their pictures taken. So they're more relaxed and we can get some incredible pictures and we can do...we do a lot of photojournalism at our weddings. Photojournalism is more of a natural type of photography where people don't realize that we're actually photographing them. More candid type photography, but we actually capture a lot of emotion using photojournalism where we can actually see, you know, people how they're feeling, the looks in their eyes, and what have you. So that's something that we really specialize in.
JOHN: Mel, could you give our listening audience your website and contact information one more time?
MEL: Yes. It's www.englanderphotography.com. At 8238 Griffin Road, Davie, FL 33328. Our phone number here is (954) 434-1321.
JOHN: I want to thank you for joining us today on VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight, Mel.
MEL: Thank you very much, John. It was very nice talking with you.
JOHN: We are speaking with Mel Englander of Englander Photography of Davie, FL. You've been listening to VTalk Radio's Photographer Spotlight. I am your host, John Bentley, thanks for joining us today.
ANNOUNCER: You have been listening to the VTalk Radio Spotlight; only on www.vtalkradio.com. Radio for the 21st Century.
go to top of the page
