Meet sweet baby Patrick James…and adorable big brother, Harrison.

So, I sent off four prints with throwup in my mouth. And I waited. And then I was estatic!!! I won!

I’m just so excited and can’t wait to receive my critiques. So without further ado….

I love all of these images with a fiery, purple passion. Thank you so much to my dear clients for sharing their beautiful children with me. I love ya’ll.

I’m going to make a book for each of the boys with these pictures and some others of us together and use this poem in it as well. I hope that one day it will a super special reminder of all the love and fun we shared during these precious years. I’m also going big with a few of the prints to finish off some redecorating I’m doing in my bathroom.

This is a really great example of what I call my “lifestyle sessions.” Real life. Be it bathtime, baking cookies, art projects..you get the idea. Isn’t this what you really want to remember?

Man, I love light. I just love it.
I love that when we wake up every morning, Austin exclaims: “Momma! Momma! Sunlight!!” That’s how I feel when I see beautiful light…all colors, all angles of it..

I guess I would have to say the biggest sign to me that I’ve made progress as a photographer is my relationship with light. I used to absolutely avoid it: shooting only in the shade or only at “magic hour.” Armed with my trusty reflector and a pretty decent understanding of all the things that come together to create a great exposure (ISO, shutter, aperture, I can have a great shoot in the wide open, at, GASP!, noon!. This would be unthinkable for me only a couple of years ago.

But, proper exposure wasn’t really what I was going for when I took my boys into this field filled with wonderful Louisiana wildflowers. I wanted to catch just how sun soaked and beautiful this field is in the evening…all that light filtering in through the golden grass. And catch it on the golden hair of my beautiful boys. These pictures are by no means, technically great pictures. We’ve got lens flare and blown out spots galore. But I love them! It was exactly what I was going for–caught the mood perfectly!

Before you get to thinking how idyllic all of this sounds, let me tell you what happened after we got done running around picking Black Eyed Susans: I went and buckled Anderson into his carseat, leaving Austin in the field. It took me awhile to retrieve Austin since he was having such a blast and didn’t want to leave. By the time we got back to the car, Anderson had managed to lock himself in my car with my keys and cell phone inside. I immediately started thinking, “WHAT IN THE *&^% am I going to do!!!??” We were in the boonies..no houses around. I had just about decided I would have to break the window when I was finally able to coax Anderson into opening the door. Situation solved. My blood pressure was through the roof! I was so flustered that I ended up leaving my galvanized tub there in the field. Good thing I went back a couple of days later to shoot little Ryleigh. (see above post)

Pretty typical, really.

The middle image is so becoming a 30 x 40 gallery wrap canvas for my bedroom. Yes, that’s obscenely large. And I love it!