March 6, 2017

Meet Justin Vonderach of the Vondys in The Valley

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Justin Vonderach.

Justin, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My wife, Shannon, is originally from St. Louis and studied photography & film at Webster University. She moved to Los Angeles after graduation in 2007 and started apprenticing under different wedding photographers. In 2009 she struck out on her own and started Shannon Lee Images. I’m originally from the Bay Area and majored in Broadcast Journalism at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. On October 30th, 2010 our paths collided as Shannon was photographing one of my best friend’s wedding for whom I was a groomsman. It was love at first sight. Soon after, we started doing the long distance dating thing, which quickly led to me quitting my job in the Bay Area to move to Los Angeles full time. I took over the role of 2nd photographer/Business Manager for Shannon Lee Images in mid-2011. On Halloween 2014, we were married at our favorite winery in Sonoma. After photographing over 150 weddings, planning our own wedding had really opened our eyes. No one was providing the type of experience that we were for our clients. With our new titles of husband & wife, we decided to take a risk and rebrand our successful business. Thus, the vondys came to be in 2015. The response to the vondys has been overwhelming, which led to 2016 being our most successful year in 7+ years of business. We can’t wait to see what 2017 has in store for us.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Owning and operating your own small business is filled with a plethora of challenges and obstacles. Even more so when the two owners/employees are romantically involved. It’s very important to find the right balance between professional and personal. We spend 95% of our time together, so it’s only natural that there will be a disagreement or misunderstanding here and there. When my wife is upset with me, it’s very important to identify if she’s mad at work Justin, or business Justin. In the rare occasion that it’s both, I go an buy her a nice bottle of whiskey and some flowers. Works every time. At any rate, I digress. I would say that learning how to manage the financial aspect of the business was the biggest challenge for us. Taxes, insurance, retirement, rent, camera equipment, oh my! Luckily, we have some great resources available to us (Shannon’s mom has owned and run her own business for almost 40 years). The other challenge is trying to find a way to break through all of the noise. Living and working in Los Angeles, provides a great opportunity as well as a great challenge. It is a city the ripe with artistic talent, so it took a while to find our own voice to help set us apart from the hundreds of other local wedding photographers. At the end of the day, these obstacles helped to make us who we are today.

Please tell us about the vondys…
We’re Justin and Shannon Vonderach (VON-DER-ACK), aka the vondys. We are The offspring of the award winning, Los Angeles based photography company, Shannon Lee Images. We are the greatest husband + wife wedding photography team of all time, as voted on by our mothers.

We love what we do and it we believe it shows in the photos we capture. Aside from simply documenting a wedding day, we strive to provide an experience unlike any other. An experience that will enhance any wedding day.

When we decided to rebrand our business to become the vondys. In 2015, we wanted to do something special to kick off the new era. We also wanted to give back in some way since weddings have given us so much and we understand how stressful planning a wedding can be after tying the knot ourselves in 2014. One of the most stressful aspects of wedding planning is trying to manage a budget, so we thought what better to do than to give one lucky couple a complete wedding photography package for free! Thus our now annual wedding photography giveaway was born.

We met so many incredible couples the first year of our giveaway, not to mention our amazing giveaway winners, Michaela & Garrett, that we decided to make our giveaway a yearly event. Now we are so excited to photograph Taylor & Brendan’s Palm Springs wedding this spring (our most recent winners)! We are excited to be launching our third annual wedding photography giveaway in August.

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
We’ve learned many valuable lessons over the past 7 years, way too many to list. I think the two most important lessons would be; to always believe in yourself, and to do your best to turn negatives into positives.

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