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Senior photo session client Erik reaches for a vinyl at Sister Anne's Records & Coffee. If you're a kid in KC you probably learned about 18th & Vine on a field trip, clipboard in hand, trying to remember whether Charlie Parker played sax or trumpet. (Sax. Alto. There will be a test.) Erik met it from the stage. He's a senior at Oak Grove High School, Class of 2027. He plays trombone, he collects records, and before he's even finished high school he has already played gigs in

At Monthly Merriment, Kansas City's wedding industry stepped outside for a smoke break and came back with a different idea of what it wanted. A photographer's account. The strange thing about wedding vendors is that we spend our working lives inside other people's best day. We know where the bride's mother hid the flask and which groomsman will cry during the toast. We arrive before anyone else and pack out long after the last guest has been poured into a rideshare. For all t

Zooey's Kansas City senior session: roller skates at Harrison Street DIY skatepark, an urbex detour and the 1908 Kessler Park Colonnade. Picture the senior session your aunt has in mind. A letterman jacket. A split-rail fence. A tree that... well, looks like every other tree. A weird half smile somebody the photographer to ask for twice. Now picture a kid in quad skates carving across a concrete bowl painted with a six-foot octopus, pink and purple hair going sideways, while

A Backyard Is a Venue. Jamie + Brad Treated It Like One, Correctly. Jamie + Brad’s intimate backyard wedding outside Lee’s Summit, Missouri, photographed by Stag & Bird, and why we’ll take a well-planned backyard wedding over a ballroom almost any day of the week. Brad + Jamie look to each other as their guests gather at their near by tent wedding reception outside of Lee's Summit, MO. At a glance Couple: Jamie + Brad. Wedding style: Intimate backyard wedding with a 15-guest

In a creative economy run on Facebook groups and free consults, the line between a client and a competitor can be one PDF wide. A Kansas City photographer on watching her own work come back to her, and what actually keeps it hers. Wet weather and I do's - a soggy knot is hard to untie or whatever the saying is. A familiar list The post went up in a local wedding group on a weekday, the way these things do. A photographer, newly focused on elopements, was asking for honest fee

After the last dance, Kansas City brides are slipping out back to light up for the camera. The canna-couples got there first. A wedding photographer reports post reception ripper. The pack out The light, as it turns out, was the easy part. The reception is thinning and Lauren and I are breaking down light stands and zclapsing Pelican cases at the end of J and B's wedding when a friend of the bride finds us before we find the car. "Hey, J is gonna rip a dart if you wanna get a

Got a kid who'd rather do literally anything than take senior pictures? Stag & Bird is an alternative senior photographer in Kansas City's West Bottoms for goth, punk, queer, artsy, and camera-shy teens. No forced smiles, no fence-and-football poses, and all black is welcome. Sessions from $275.

Couples boudoir at Stag & Bird in Kansas City's West Bottoms. Intimate, cinematic sessions for partners who have lived some life together and want proof of it. Kansas City has named Stag & Bird the best place for boudoir - and couples agree. Picture it. Tuesday night, you're both on the couch, and one of you says "we should post something for our anniversary." So you start scrolling. The dog. The dog in a sweater. A blurry Royals game where he's half out of frame. A screensho

Kansas City Senior Photo Shoot Senior pictures in Kansas City - with a solid, reputable photographer - run anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to several thousand dollars, depending on how much time, styling, and finished artwork you walk away with. At Stag & Bird, cap and gown micro sessions are $275, the Senior Session Limited starts at $650, most families land on our Senior Full Digital at $1,100, and our flagship Curated Senior Portrait Experience is $2,950. A lot of pho

Every application asked what you were hoping for in a match. The men had specs. Detailed ones. Younger (like "I'm looking for a woman aged 20-27" and the dude would be 45). Conventionally attractive. Some of them read like a custom truck build sheet. Very confident about what they had coming to them. The women wrote things like "someone who will be nice to me and is funny." Hell, most of them said they were open to any gender, any physical trait... just, looking for nic

Stag & Bird is a Kansas City wedding and elopement photography studio that specializes in dark, editorial, Halloween-season weddings for couples who want their day to look like a Michele Lamy and Rick Owens shoot, not a costume party. We're based in the West Bottoms with a home location in Belton, Missouri, and Halloween books out faster than any other season we shoot. Normal engagement season runs Thanksgiving through Valentine's. Ours starts the second someone feels that pu

This is what we mean when we say we shoot alternative engagement sessions in Kansas City. Not a template. Not a pose list copied from Pinterest. A day built around who two people actually are. Congratulations, Anna and Paige. This was one of our favorites.

For this post, we're only sharing the candids. Real, fully non-prompted, photojournalistic moments from the day. No posed shots here, no direction, no "look this way." If it's in this gallery, it's because it happened on its own and we were standing in the right spot with a camera.

If you've already decided you want "6 hours of coverage" for your wedding, you don't know shit about fuck. (Thank you Rose a la Ozarks for that line.) Here's the short version: you can't know your hours yet, and that's fine. Full breakdown on the blog.

I used to hate the phrase "perception is reality." Now I live by it. A few years ago I went public with my politics and lost 12% of my following, plus a handful of signed contracts. It came back bigger. Down the street, a small business made its own alignment public through who they chose to sponsor, and now they're finding out what that costs. Brand alignment cuts both ways. You don't get to be surprised by which side of that blade lands on you.

I've built and failed a business, built and sold a couple businesses, and I am now scaling creative businesses well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales a year - and have done so in art forward spaces with creative entrepreneurship for nearly 20 years. You can take my advice or leave it. WRITTEN BY COURTNEY SPECHT | photographer, writer, speaker, mentor | KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI Ten or eleven years ago "community over competition" was really a thing. Rising Tide

I've built and failed a business, built and sold a couple businesses, built am now scaling businesses well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales a year - and have done so in creative spaces with creative entrepreneurship for nearly 20 years. Take my advice or leave it. WRITTEN BY COURTNEY SPECHT | photographer, writer, speaker, mentor | KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI I get a lot of "can I pick your brain about marketing?" I love that, I genuinely do. But more often than

When couples start planning their engagement session, they tend to reach for the obvious — the location that photographs beautifully, the backdrop they've seen in someone else's gallery. What Michael and Marisa's Kansas City session taught us is that the right place and the prettiest place are rarely the same thing.

Photographers know this phrasing well, we see it in Facebook groups, neighborhood apps, community boards, basically anywhere people gather online to ask for recommendations: "Hey! Looking for a photographer for maybe thirty minutes. We just want a few quick photos. Nothing crazy, shouldn't cost an arm and a leg. Any recommendations?" If you're not in the industry, that sounds completely reasonable, truthfully. You know roughly how long you think you want someone around, you

A Collaborative Giveaway from Courtney Specht | Stag & Bird Curated Photo Experiences + Lindsey Chevalier | Fox Fire Tattoos at Golden Stag Tattoo Some moments in life pass quickly. A proposal, a promise, the realization that you’ve found the person you’re going to build something forever with. Most couples celebrate that chapter with a handful of engagement photos done the way they think they're supposed to do it and a celebratory dinner. But some stories deserve more than