Alright. It's a new year and time for resolutions and such. So let me start by at least starting on one New Year's Resolution (and yes, I know that it's February, haha): posting more client sessions.

Yes, I do workshops and, yes, I do design and sell actions and such for Photoshop.  But I am first and foremost a photographer. I firmly believe in practicing what I preach. So I photograph. A lot. It feels like every other day I'm shooting a family or consulting with a client or traveling to a wedding. But as I was looking through my blog for 2011, it dawned on me that you don't see that. Cause I'm REALLY bad about posting client sessions. And when I don't post them, it looks like I'm not actually busy in the true work of photography. But I am. And I need to be better about showing my client sessions. So I do intend to get caught up, haha. But in the meantime, how's about a little taste of 2011.

So here you have it. One image from every client session I shot in 2011. Just one. Though I really wanted to post more, I limited myself to just one image per session. Realize that for some of these images, they represent an entire day shooting a wedding or hours photographing a large multi-generational family. There are no workshop images here, no photos of my kids, no "creativity" sessions, no commercial shoots (though I did all those too). Those will have to wait for another blog post. These are my actual clients. Ironically, 2011 was not my busiest photographic year, haha. Spending nearly a month in Australia over peak wedding season put a damper on my wedding bookings. But I still hugged repeat clients and made amazing new friends and cried during EVERY "first dance" I photographed (that's why I have such a large camera; it's useful for hiding behind).

So, in no particular order, welcome to my 2011:










































































































Thank you if you've made it this far through the images! I'm so excited for 2012 and can't wait to do the same sort of post next year too!

So for this month's installment of the lifestyle blog circle I belong to, I thought that I would post a couple snapshots I took of my kids on Laguna Beach a couple weeks ago. It's been an extremely dry but very cold winter here in Utah. It's like the worst combination. Bitterly cold but no snow so the kids can't really sled or do any wintery things and it's waaayyy too cold to do anything else outside. So a week in sunny, summery Laguna Beach was just what I needed. The thermometer in my Jeep read 12 degrees when we left home and then steadily climbed as we drove south, hitting 80 degrees when we reached Anaheim. Ah yes, THAT was heaven. It took the kids all of about 3 minutes to get into the ocean once we arrived in Laguna.

So here are a couple shots. This is actually an iPhone snap of all three kids right after we arrived. Yes, they're still in their "Utah" clothes. They just rolled up their pant legs . . . . well, sorta . . . they pretty much got soaked . . . . . and love me some iPhone sunflare, haha.


This is the next day more properly prepared with a real camera and wet suits . . .


So loved the sunburst reflection at the bottom of the image with this last one . . . uh yeah, I totally meant to do that, haha.


That's just a little taste of our trip. To continue the circle, hop on over and see what Brenda Acuncius | Dallas/Ft. Worth Child Photographer has done this month!

Well, as some of you know, I've been working on a fabulous new set of flares and sunbursts for Flourish. And it's finally up on the website. I so love this new set! I know it's a good set if I can't seem to stop obsessively using it, haha. This new set includes 22 huge overlays that I've created from actual sunflare, so it's not PS-created sunflare, but the real deal that you're integrating into a photo. This creates extremely believable sunflare. And even better, this set uses our Flourish Palette which allows you to see all the sunflares at once, choose which one you'd like to integrate and then the palette opens, merges and integrates the texture for you, all in just seconds. So fabulous and saves so much time! You can watch a little demo video of this set in action here and see the set here.

And even better, save 20% on your entire Flourish purchase between now and Jan 15. Just enter code

flare2012

at checkout! And here are a couple before and after images from the set, just to give you a taste of what this set does.

Whew! I hope that everyone is having a fabulous holiday season right now. As a little added extra bonus of holiday cheer, we've just posted mentoring information to our {life as art} workshop website. If you'd been wanting to have a one-on-one mentoring experience or to even shadow me on a photosession, now is your chance! You can see all of the details here.

Along with this, I will be in Southern California doing photosessions and mentoring sessions in the middle of January. If you would be interested in scheduling a photosession or mentoring session, please email me. I still have an opening or two.

And a little winter fun . . . . .

I just want to spread some happy holiday cheer and give a little thank you to all of you who have made this year such a fabulous one!

So first of all, here is a free 5x7 holiday template. Cause if you're like me, you're still working on your own personal Christmas cards. Just add your photo and print!



You can download the template here. Note that the font at the bottom of the template (the taylor family) is 1942 Report.

And for a little shopping help, how about saving 25% at Flourish Emporium. Just use this code at checkout and receive an additional 25% off your order (in addition to our already amazing multi-item discounts).

holiday2011

So shop now at Flourish Emporium!

And last but not least, how about a little love from the {life as art} workshops? Enter this coupon code to save $50 off your purchase of any [life as art] workshop:

holidayWorkshop2011

And even better, we've discounted our Beginner Manual by 100%! That's right, check out with any [life as art] workshop and add the Beginner Manual to your cart for FREE! All coupon codes are valid through Dec. 31, 2012.
 
Whew! That's a lot of holiday goodness! Wishing you a fabulous holiday season.

Continue through this blog circle and see all the other amazing fine art that others have done. So visit Brenda Acunius and see what she's done!

For this month's installment for "What ___ Looks Like," I couldn't help but think about family. Like all of you, I'm crazy busy this time of year. But over Thanksgiving, I had a little time to just sit and chat with my grandma. She's always been one of those amazing grandmas. The kind that would come to every event in my life (no matter how small) and would always have a plate of cookies and fashion magazine waiting for me. Christmas was always a big event. She would start planning the January before and would have a wide array of gifts for each of us, all perfectly wrapped in glitzty paper. She would bake for days before the party and the night was never complete unless we took a plate of baklava and homemade almond roca home with us. Her party was as much a highlight of Christmas as Christmas morning.

My grandma is 93 now and now we throw the Christmas party for her. She still lives in the same house she's lived in for over 50 years. She's slowed down in recent years, but in talking with her over Thanksgiving, she was still the same feisty, spunky woman she's always been. I'm so blessed to have had such a woman in my life. I love that even at 93, she insists on having her hair perfectly done with make-up and earrings.



When my husband and I were engaged, he asked me what type of wedding ring I wanted. I told him that my grandma had the most beautiful wedding ring I had ever seen. It was a platinum ring from the 1930's with vintage engravings and inset diamonds. I wanted something like hers. My husband, in the wonderful wisdom I married him for, suggested that instead of finding something similar, why not copy her ring exactly. It was the perfect solution. So Grandma lent us her wedding ring for a day or two so we could have a copy made of it. I wear her ring everyday and it constantly reminds me of her and my sweet grandpa and the amazing marriage they had. Here's her ring on her hand with the diamond solitaire that my grandpa gave her for their 50th wedding anniversary. Perhaps my husband will give me something similar on our 50th wedding anniversary.



Be sure to head over to Brenda Acuncius | Dallas/Fort Worth Child Photographer and see what she has done for this month's project!

Okay! We have a winner of our {life as art} Workshop contest! Thank you so much to everyone who entered. We ended up with over a 1000 entries in the end! We entered all the entries into a spreadsheet and then used www.random.org to generate a random number. And the winner is Ann Easterling! So congrats to Ann! And thanks again to everyone who entered!

Well, if you're like me, you're most likely still struggling with what to do about holiday cards this year. As a photographer, I feel like I need to send out cards each year. If nothing else, it forces me to do at least one session a year with my kids, haha. I try to come up with something fun and unique each year, but I don't think that I'm topping last years card, to be honest. Of all my cards, it was my fav. I just so loved everything about it. Sigh. I'm half tempted to just copy the same idea again this year. Anyway, as many of you have been asking to see it, I thought that I would post it here for you. Maybe it will help give us all a little inspiration for our cards this year.

So this card was actually 4 different cards, all 4.5x5.5 in size, printed on a thick, matte cardstock paper. The cards were printed front and back and I wrapped them together in an off-white Thai handmade see-through lace paper and then wrapped them in a sage green ribbon and sealed the ribbon with a silver foil printed sticker. Everything went into a gold metallic envelope.

For the cards, I did a front card and then each of the following 3 cards represented one of my 3 children. I wanted something that really captured who they are as people, so I asked each kid to write their name and then take a black pen and draw pictures that represented them. I then scanned the images into my computer and hand-colored each picture in Photoshop and did the design and commentary for each child. I just so love that each card really captured who they are as people and that they were able to tell about themselves directly.

The images for the card were taken at my fav ghost town in Montana, which we had visited as part of a family vacation earlier in the year (cause hey, family vacation for me means going somewhere cool for a session too, haha). Each set below represents the front and back of each card.

Card #1


Card #2: I love how he wrote each of his interests and his name in his best cursive handwriting . . .


Card #3: I so love how you just so see her personality with this. She had to add bling to everything.


Card #4: With this card, obviously my 2-year-old wasn't quite old enough to really draw discernible pictures. So I gave my husband a sharpie (yeah, a big, black sharpie) and a single piece of paper and asked him to draw what Kian told him to. My husband seriously came back in less than 5 minutes with these drawings on the paper. Freehanded without a single mistake . . . . married to someone for 12 years and he just whips out this amazing talent for illustration. Who knew?!


So there you are . . . . now I need to stop procrastinating and get back to actually designing my card for this year, haha . . . . Hope you're enjoying this holiday season!

Well, I have to be honest and say that I've really been looking forward to this post. We took a little family trip to Montana a couple weeks ago to my favorite ghost town and found even more to love about the place. I think that they have about the coolest cemetery in the whole country (well, from my romantic photographers viewpoint). Old, falling-down picket fences surround large gravestones with sage brush overgrowing everything.

I have to say, I love everything about desert sage brush. It's silvery, muted green color and little leaves that blur so beautifully . . . . and then there's the smell of it, especially after a rain storm . . . . there's nothing quite like it. It speaks of wild, forgotten places for me. As I did this shoot right before Halloween, right on the heels of autumn, everything about it felt melancholy . . . I wanted to evoke mourning . . . I also fell in love with my 85 1.2 lens all over again. I actually don't shoot with it that much, but it really suited everything that I was going for here, so all the images from these sessions were shot with it.

So here are a couple images. There are many, many more to follow, but these suffice for now. First off, my daughter. She's always my favorite muse and she really got into character here (though it did cost me a $30 toy from Amazon to get her to actually touch the headstone).




And then a bride . . . . I really don't think that I could love this bride any more. She's as gorgeous inside as she is outside and a truly amazing model. Not only did she and her new husband drive forever to the middle-of-nowhere Montana, but she was so much fun to work with and such a trooper with the cold, cold wind that was blowing throughout this whole shoot. I completely admit that my inspiration for this came from Kamee June (who is also part of this circle, so check out her work!). She did a ghost shoot a year or two ago and I couldn't resist doing my own. So I shot every series of images on a tripod and also shot the scene without anyone in it and then faded the two together when editing. So here's just a taste of this entire shoot.



I do think that this will go down as my fav shoot of 2011. You know it's a good shoot when you slowly savor editing every image. There will be many more to come.

But in the meantime, don't forget to check out the amazing workshop giveaway we're doing and enter to win your choice of {life as art} workshop! And also don't forget to continue through this blog circle and see all the other amazing fine art creations that others have done. So hop on over to Maureen Wilson Maureen Wilson | photographer in McComb Mississippi and see what she's done!