I have a terrible time saying no, so I shot three newborns in one week. To give you an idea, I usually do one maybe two per month, so this was quite unusual for me and a little bit terrifying.

I have a confession – I don’t really LOVE  newborn photography. There, I said it! Partly though I think it’s because I’m just not that GOOD at it.  I mean I’m good at lighting and shooting them, but the posing and handling part I just don’t feel 100% confident in.  In fact, after EVERY newborn session I swear that I’m not going too book another one until I take a newborn workshop! But then, some time passes and I get a little amnesia and get excited about the challenge again and I cave.

So, there I was with three newborn sessions, each more difficult than the one before. But then I realized I was using the same techniques to try to salvage what I could from the shoots and that those techniques might be useful/helpful to anyone else who is photographing a less than perfect sleeper!

First, what follows is assuming you are employing all the BASIC techniques of newborn photography including keeping the room as close to 90 degrees as possible, using some sort of white noise app, making sure blankets and surfaces are warm before placing baby on them etc.  What I’m talking about here is when you are doing everything “by the book” and it’s STILL not going well -what can you do to make sure you get enough variety for a gallery?

1) Swaddle. Duh, you knew this already right?  But, there’s a twist.. I find that the types of fabrics that I was using to swaddle sleeping newborns to be completely inadequate for swaddling awake babies that are moving their arms and legs and tend to break free much too easily from any fabric with slip.. so I went out recently to BRU and bought some semi-attractive looking regular type of receiving blankets for this purpose.  Before my next session, I’m going to order these stretchy knit scarves from Van Klee instead.

2) Move to the parent shots. I find that even fussy babies are usually OK with doing parent shots for at least as long as it takes to fire off a few frames!

And, if not, see #1! During the session above, I only BRIEFLY shot this image before baby lost it. So we fed him, tried to come back later but he still wasn’t having any of it, so as a last resort we swaddled him for the family shot:

3) Staying on the topic of parent shots for a second, there is one pose in particular that I find can usually be achieved even when baby is not sleeping or even that calm, partly because you can’t see baby’s face that well, but also because the frog-like leg position and hand around baby’s head like this keeps the baby well contained even when awake. Plus, often the interest of looking into their parents’ faces will hold their attention long enough to get them to calm down a bit:

This baby was also pretty fussy when this shot was taken:

4)  Enlist one of the parents to help you hold the blanket up vs. having it clipped to a stand.  This is something I recently started doing and it has made a world of difference in how free I am to rotate the beanbag’s angle towards the window to get my lighting just how I want it.  But as it pertains to a difficult session, this will also allow you more freedom to shoot the same pose from different angles.  For example, after this shot:

I tried pulling him up over the “bump” I had created in the blankets expecting him to keep his head angled the same way, but then he turned it.  Instead of trying to make his head turn the way it had been (and risking him waking up in protest!)  I rotated my whole beanbag so that his body was no longer at a 45 degree angle but instead at a 90 degree angle from the window.

I can’t tell you how much this freedom from “blanket clipping” has helped me with getting more optimal light and angles throughout my newborn shoots!

5)  Shoot the details. When you REALLY are struggling to get the requisite number of shots, details shots will add some much needed variety:

It’s not just a gimmick either, parents LOVE these shots! The mom told me that this smooshy lip thing he’s doing is his signature move, so you can BET that’s something the parents want to remember!

6) Accessorize Accessorize Accessorize.  Often, I end up getting 90% of the shots from a session during one 15 minute stretch of REALLY deep sleep.  When that happens, I will literally switch out hats and bows like a mad woman trying to get some variety before I risk a bigger move like changing blankets.  This little guy REALLY gave us a run for our money until literally the LAST 10 minutes of the shoot when he finally feel into a super deep sleep.. so once we got him in the bucket I just changed up the hats and kept shooting!

7) Prioritize. I always set expectations with the parents that we may not get through all the shots they want, so I ask them what is MOST important to them and shoot that first. I had one client that REALLY wanted a swaddled shot. Normally I swaddle when baby isn’t cooperating as a plan B, but it was so important to her that we actually swaddled this little girl even though she was deeply sleeping:

If left to me, I always assume that baby on blanket and baby with parents are most important, but sometimes the parents have other ideas (they might want that prop shot more!) so it’s ALWAYS a good idea to ask!

8) Don’t be too hard on yourself, you probably have more than enough.  The second to last newborn I did was my hardest one EVER. I seriously could not move her fingers without her waking up screaming. By the end of the session we were all a little stressed out and I was just really down about it.  But then I realized that the shots we did get were great.  In fact, this is one of my favorite newborn images I’ve ever taken:

And in the end, even though we didn’t have enough variety for say a huge album, we had covered all our bases.  We had some beautiful wide awake swaddled shots, a few full body shots as above, a shot of the whole family and a shot of mom with baby and dad with baby.  Honestly, that’s plenty to choose from when it comes to the parents ordering products.. often times parents order  multiple copies of their favorite one or two shots anyway, and all it takes is ONE great shot printed on a large canvas to make an impressive statement:

Or just the three parent/family shots to make a fantastic grouping:

And two are all you really need for a beautiful birth announcement!

So while you may be beating yourself up about the lack of variety,  you are probably the only one. The parents were there -they KNOW how difficult the session was and they are most likely just incredibly grateful that you were able to get ANY wonderful shots and will be pleasantly surprised!  That’s how this family was – in the end we laughed about it, they got what they needed and everyone was happy.

Hopefully all your newborns are good sleepers and you won’t ever need any of the tips above. If so, you are luckier and probably better at handling babies than I am :)

Two weeks later it was picture pick up day and I was so pleasantly surprised that I bought the most expensive package! I did hesitate for a moment – after all it’s not like I have any shortage of pictures of Jasper. But then I thought if I don’t appreciate the value of “good photography” who will?  I was just very happy with the expressions they got and the prints were beautiful.

Unfortunately the digital images that came in my email a week or so ago were not nearly as good. I think they have the lab color and exposure correct them because they looked way dark and dull on the digitals.. so shhh – don’t tell anyone I had to adjust these a tad.. (but makes me wonder about the other parents who bought digitals that don’t have photoshop and the know-how to use it- let’s hope they have print lab with great autocorrect!)

I think what it comes down to is that I’m just a sucker for that face! Can you blame me??

The light in our bedroom is spectacular for pictures, it comes in from camera left and we have those white paper accordion shades from home depot that soften it just the right amount.

{Can you believe how long his eyelashes are? Mine used to be like that too..what happened?}

My 50mm 1.4 lens is perfect for these types of shots (if you have a crop sensor camera a 30mm or so will give you the same field of view as my 50 on the full frame Mark II.)

I barely had to post process these, just a white balance adjustment, slight bump in the blacks and tiny bit of midtone lifting.

What’s fun about taking pictures with Bear in them is that Jasper enjoys it – he likes to see each picture on the back of my viewfinder!

In other news, we had our third IUI today, I sure hope this one works – if not, the next step is IVF. Jasper really wants a baby brother or sister..last time we left the RE’s office he said  “But mommy, why didn’t he give is a baby brother or sister?”

If only it were that easy..

This is something I should have written almost a year ago when my friend Gale first passed. I didn’t for several reasons. One was that the pain was still too fresh, it took me months after her death to not cry uncontrollably every time I thought about her, which was often.  Even now a year later I am crying as I write.

The other reason was that I felt guilty and selfish to announce my sadness to the world when her family’s loss was so great – what was my grief compared to theirs? Compared to the the man that she had been married to since they were teenagers, to the two grown sons and a teenage daughter who was like her shadow?

But this Saturday morning I attended a tree-planting ceremony in her honor that made all my sadness fresh again.  After her husband sang a song a Capella that left everyone in tears he asked if anyone wanted to say a few words.  And I wanted to.  But a fear of public speaking and the hesitation I mentioned before kept me mute.   But there is SO much I want to say about Gale, and the wonderful woman she was and what her friendship meant to me.  I want her to hear it, but I don’t know where to say it other then here, so here it is.

Gale was a force of nature. A fireball of energy and laughter with a razor sharp tongue. She had a way of seeing  through  anyone and anything straight to the essence of the matter.  She was NEVER afraid to speak her mind and it got her into trouble on many an occasion!  But more than anything, Gale’s true gift was to see the best in people and make them think that they were someone incredibly special. To see yourself through Gales eyes was to see a person that you wanted to be but rarely felt you were.

There has never been, and I doubt will ever be anyone in my life who thought I was as amazing as Gale did. And I’m not just talking about now that I have achieved  many of the goals in life that were just theoretical when I met her at the age of 13.  I mean THEN, when I don’t believe many other people saw what she did through the hair flipping, gum chewing insecure girl that I was!

She was my first boss at my first job working for Weleda in the accounting department. I worked for a few hours after school and summers, I  made $3.33 an hour and loved every minute.   Gale was funny and loud and welcoming and we’ve been friends ever since.   Somehow the 20 year age difference was a complete non issue, though in retrospect there was great value to having had an “older” friend, wise in so many ways who would pop in and out of my life but was always there if I needed her. I wish I could be the kind of friend to her teenage daughter that she was to me – there would be such a poetic  symmetry to that.  And I want to, both because she is an amazing young woman and also because it keeps Gale’s memory alive for me, but I lack Gale’s easygoing social nature.  I’m not as dynamic and fun and and the appeal to a teenage girl of being my friend is lost on me.

Over the 25+ years of our friendship, her outspoken admiration for me was a huge well of encouragement in all my endeavors.  As if perhaps in her eyes I could do anything, there was a possibility that I truly could.

I realized later that even while I felt like I was the only person she thought so highly of, of course that was not true – that was her gift.  She made people feel there was something indelibly special about everyone she held dear.   And if she made a mere friend feel that way I can’t even imagine how her family felt being in her orbit and then suddenly not.

In her last weeks I visited with her in hospice a few times and I didn’t tell her how much her friendship meant to me.. because to do so meant acknowledging to her, to myself and everyone else in the room that it was really happening, that we were  losing her. So instead I visited and pretended like nothing out of the ordinary was happening,  a sad, stupid wasted opportunity. But I hope that my presence there told her what I wasn’t able to find the words to say.

Two years before she got sick she helped my best friend Alexis plan my baby shower and she gave me a beautiful gift that is so painfully ironic now.  An ethereal  mobile of angels in rainbow colors that I hung immediately above Jasper’s changing table.

Ever since he could speak, Jasper has asked me about the mobile and I have always told him that mommy’s friend Gale gave it to him as a special gift. When he asked again just days after hear death and I told him that Mommy’s friend Gale had given him the beautiful angels and that now she was an angel too, watching over him always.

Goodbye Gale.  You are missed so very much.

Mom and I really clicked – sometimes you just know from the tone of an email or a phone conversations that certain clients are going to feel like old friends, and that’s how it was with the mom (Connie) from this session!  Like I mention in the blog post we had to cut our first session together short due to rain and they let it roll of them like it didn’t matter at all and then were totally up for rescheduling whenever/wherever I wanted. Seriously, if all clients could be this laid back photography would be a much easier job!

Anyway, so I had a feeling that mom and I had similar tastes, so I really wanted her to be the first client I showed the Organic Bloom frames to! I only finally just got my act together to become an OB reseller even though I’ve been working with the creators Andrea and Jason to do their frames in my wall guides since I met Andrea at ImagingUSA in January! But I only had the 5×7 frame that she gave me when we met, so I had ordered a sample set and color blocks. The color blocks I got within five days, but the sample orders take 15 business days or so, so I only had that 5×7 frame.. or so I thought.

Turns out, I somehow misplaced an ENTIRE large bag of my samples including a 16×20 canvas, some of the WHCC metal and wood finish standouts and my organic bloom frame. I seriously wanted to cry. How I misplaced such a large bag I have no idea, but I was just grateful it wasn’t the bag with my sample albums!  So I was searching in vain for the bag everywhere when I found the 5×7 OB frame that I had put in a black soft bag to protect. Yay!   But when I took it out of the bag I realized that the bag had somehow stained the finish black – boo!  So I typed a desperate email to Rachel at OB and asked if there was any way they could 2 day ship me ANY frame they had laying around.  She had an 8×10 Mary Ann with the Antique glaze on it, so I said yes please (even though I wasn’t sure about the glaze) and got it the next day!

I literally squealed when I got that package – I knew I loved OB frames, but this one (8×10 Mary Ann in Jamaican Seas with antique glaze) is STUNNING.  I know, I shouldn’t even be typing this post without taking a picture of it, but I haven’t had time to take a pic that would do it justice!

So, I went to the ordering appointment armed with my new 8×10 frame which is actually an impressive size in the OB frames, maybe because those pretty scrolly shapes add a lot more size than a plain frame?

And then I got there, set up for the slideshow and realized I’d fogotten my bag with the sample in it. DOH! My excuse is that I was at the tail end of a nasty cold- I had been out of it for days. ( Not sure how that explains misplacing the other bag of samples!)  Luckily Connie was totally fine with me running home to get them, which gave her some time to sit with the images and figure out what she wanted.

Then we got down to the ordering and she loved the OB frame – and I realized I had forgotten the color blocks.  Yeah, it was that kind of day.

LUCKILY, I had been working on my wall guides/OB product and have it to the point that I can use it during sales sessions to provide a very good mock up, so we were able to create something gorgeous for Connie anyway:

They are planning an expansion of their house so the frames will go in their new family room. The wall color was one I picked with my wall guides that I thought would match the images and black frames well and using this awesome website I was able to match the hex color from my wall guides to a Benjamin Moore paint color (Azure Water  – 677.) Connie loved the mock up so much she might paint her new family room that color!

(This experience made me realize how full circle my world has come, starting out as a home/renovation/decor blogger, then going to photography, then creating these wall guides which in some ways is like a combination of home design and photography! )

Anyway, I really loved being able to offer her the OB frames because it feels like I’m finally offering a FULL service rather than leaving it up to the client to get framing done on their own.  Plus, even 8×10s (and certainly 11×14s) look really impressive in the OB frames, and since those are sizes I offer with pretty much all my packages it doesn’t take much for the client to upgrade a bit to a frame and get much more than just the “gift prints” included with my lower packages.   In fact, that’s the only concern that I have with the frames is that it will eat too much into my canvas sales.   The markup on the frames (if you use OB’s suggested retail price) is really low, so it is almost more of a service to your clients rather than a way to increase your bottom line. I might adjust the prices I offer them at in the future for that reason. (I’m Curious to hear how those of you that sell OB -or any frames- mark them up for profit if you don’t mind sharing?)

And because I love it soooo much, here’s is one of the wall mock ups I prepared  for my next ordering session for the gorgeous twins I shot a month or so ago:

The Organic Bloom Wall Guides are my next major project once I (finally) finish set III.. can I please just have 24 more hours in each day?? :)

This week is “Bike safety week” at daycare and, blow me over but it’s working!

Last night we were hanging with Popop on the deck and Jasper got on his tricycle and said “Where’s my helmet? We need to wear helmets so that if we fall off we don’t get hurt.”  Have I told you how much we love our daycare?

Anyway, that lasted for a few minutes until the strap under his chin started to annoy him.  It’s too loose and he won’t let me adjust it, so he has to keep his mouth open wide as in the above to get it to stay on. It’s always something with this kid…

Today is the St. Jude’s Trike-a-thon at daycare so the kids bring in their helmets and trikeys from home and ride laps around the parking lot etc.  It’s threatening rain but I’m very excited about the potential photo opps. Wish me luck!

Well, those of you who are facebook friends know that the trip didn’t get off to the best start when I called Jeff during my layover in Houston to find out that he and Jasper were in the Emergency Room. That’s right, I’d been gone for a whole 4 hours and all hell had already broken loose!

It’s kind of a long story, but in a nutshell – Jeff was putting wall tethers on the big screen TV in the bedroom and using the electric drill.  He was attaching them to the wall and Jasper was pressing the button on the drill and all the sudden starts SCREAMING as if he’d been hurt. When Jeff rushed over to see what was wrong Jasper said something about losing Daddy’s screw – all gone, need new one.. etc. Then Jeff heard Jasper gulp really loudly as if he’d swallowed something..then he asked Jasper if he swallowed the something and Jasper said the tiny screw..and Jeff couldn’t find the drill bit.

So, he rushed him to the ER where they x-rayed him and determined there was no drill bit anywhere in his system and then fed him a cookie to see if he could swallow and eat ok, which he did just fine and now the ER is his new favorite place.

Jeff found the drill bit under the radiator the next morning!

So, totally NOT the way to start 3 days away from your baby for the first time, but I was quickly comforted when I got to my amazing suite at the Contessa in San Antonio. Yes, a whole living room, bathroom and King size bed JUST FOR ME!

I had debated about getting a roommate, someone from Clickinmoms or ILP or someone else that I “know” from online, but in the end I’m so glad I opted not to – it was completely luxurious and self indulgent and I enjoyed every second of it!

Oh wait, going back a sec.. I was on the plane looking through some of my wall guide examples that I stored on my iPad when someone across the aisle from me said “Hey, are those the Photographer’s Wall Display Guides? I was just on that site a few days ago!”

So funny. It turned out that he was a photographer named Kevin Millard, who I ended up hanging out with quite a bit.  Kevin is going to be big in the photography world someday, and while he gets there he’ll be holding  the door open for you and saying “thank you ma’am” the whole way.

Here’s a picture of Kevin on our last day:

Kevin Millard

(I have NO idea what sort of ninja move he’s trying to do here! Kevin?)

But anyway,  the first morning I set my alarm for 6:30,  thinking perhaps I’d make the 7am class at the convention center.. I BARELY made it to the 9am class (I felt like a delinquent teenager!)

I chose to see Hanson Fong, which was interesting.. the talk was on posing. He focused a lot on how he “raises and lowers” people in group shots and showed a lot of before and after slides of a group before where all the heads are on the same level, and then after when he’d “raised and lowered” people. Not coincidentally, he sells these foam block thingies meant to take on location to have people stand on to get those staggered heights.

(This was not the first, nor the last talk where the speaker did a mini infomercial -or in the case of Bry Cobb it was not so mini! – for one of their products)

He also demonstrated his method of posing people so that you always have the slimmest person up front hiding the heavier person and showed before and afters. I do feel like this was a good class for me, because sometimes we get so caught up in getting the perfect light, the perfect background, getting the kids to pay attention etc, that we don’t focus enough on making SURE the adults look good. And we all know that if mom doesn’t like the way she looks, she’s not buying it, so it does pay off to take a few extra minutes posing mom in the most flattering way possible (dads too!)

Then, everyone gathered in front of the expo hall and waited to be let in and finally we all started making our way in like a giant heard of cattle:

I couldn’t have really avoided the giant WHCC booth if I tried, so I took a look around and noticed immediately that they are now doing die cut cards like Millers!

WHCC boutique cards

In fact, these die cut shapes seem to be EVERYWHERE now,  H&H has a few shapes and are adding more soon, Simply Color Lab has die cut cards AND stickers and magnets… I grabbed tons of samples of cards because it’s not like you can order just one as a studio sample (they only come in packs of 25!)

Here is a trifold card with a die cut magnet attached from Simply Color Lab. Don’t those make the best save the dates ever? I wish I had known about pro print lab press printing back when I got married :)

close up of die cut magnet

Back to WHCC – I wanted to see  their album covers and those “boutique” album bags they are now selling.  I was most interested in seeing what their canvas wrap album covers look like and was kind of disappointed that they didn’t have any that looked true matte canvas. The ones that were there had a protective spray that gave them a really glossy almost plastic finish.  I also saw in person how great their satin paper is (looks SO much like photographic paper!!) but I don’t think I could order those – anything but their watercolor paper comes back CRAZY red/magenta for me. Too bad because they look very nice.

Seeing those album bags in person confirmed what I had thought when I first saw them online.. I don’t like them.  There is just something not very refined about them, the fabrics/patterns just don’t do it for me. Too bad because they are a nice idea.

Also, I was suprised to see that WHCC now offers backdrops! I didn’t like any of them, but fabric backdrops aren’t really my thing, unless you are talking drop it modern..

Speaking of which I really liked the drop it modern patterns, but when speaking to the very beautiful (and tall!) owner, I made a point of asking about wrinkling.. she said that they definitely need a steam if brought on location, so that sort of nixed it for me. Maybe someday if/when I have a studio!

Next I wandered over to Finao. I have to say that their album covers are just unbelievably beautiful.  There is one new cover type with the rather unfortunate name “Erotika” (sorry, that’s kind of an awkward name to be discussing with your family photography client!!!)

I only got a crappy iPhone picture of it (I ended up being to lazy to cary my camera around!!) that does not even BEGIN to do it justice because you can’t see the metallic part but here it is:

What you can’t tell from this image that only where the extreme highlights are (in this case the chrome of the motorcycle) is metallic, the rest is matte color. It’s just REALLY stunning, I wish you could all see it in person!

Right next door, Jerry Ghionis was at his booth talking and showing before and after slides of what a room looked like when he entered it and then what he got in camera (using OCF). AMAZING. This guy is a total rockstar. I left his booth vowing to master OCF.

Then I stopped at Graphistudio. I really wasn’t impressed with the “bendiness” of their album pages. Instead of being thick board, the pages felt to me the way paper does when you get it  laminated at kinkos! Don’t get me wrong, the images looked great, I just didn’t like the more flimsy pages compared to real album books.

Next door at the Nikon booth, I stopped to hear Ami Vitale talk about her transition from stills to film, but really, I was just riveted by ALL of her images!!  Definitely a highlight for me.

Next I wandered by the Wild Sorbet booth – this would not be the first or last time I saw them at the expo. They were EVERYWHERE!  I think they dropped their frames by other vendors booths to see if anyone wanted to build displays with them, so I saw their lovely frames many many places.. for example, at the simply color/canvas booth who had a whole display demonstrating their circle prints in Wild Sorbet frames:

Circle prints seem like a very nice way to offer something a little different to your clients!

For those of you who like the look of the Wild Sorbet frames, but not the cost,  go check out Organic Bloom ASAP!  Which brings me to dinner that night which I had with Andrea Sooter (half of the husband and wife team that own Organic Bloom) and her best friend photographer Brenda Horan and Brenda’s husband. After waiting outside in the cold wet for far too long, we had a very nice dinner and I’m happy to say that I’ll be doing SOMETHING with my wall guides to incorporate some of the organic bloom frames at requests of my customers and hers! She also gave me a gorgeous 5×7 frame – I don’t even have any 5×7s, so I put an old promo card in there – hence the brown bar at the bottom!

After dinner I headed over to the Canon Party where I ran into Kevin who said it was kind of lame and was headed to the WHCC party at Howl at the Moon.  The timing was great because I had been texting with Meagan Dougherty, a local photog and blog reader (hi!) that I was really excited to meet, and she was with Alicia Gould and Jenny Miller.

from left to right: Alicia, Meagan, Kevin and me. Photo courtesty of Jenny Miller!

I had been looking forward to meeting these girls (who I “knew” from ILP and Clickinmoms) and was really happy to finally hook up with them, however, a loud crazy free drinks party is not exactly the best place to get to know anyone! Meagan and I managed to exchange a few yelled sentences before we all finally went home. But wow, WHCC throws a good party!  If you don’t believe me, check this out:

The next day, no surprise, I missed the 7am class yet again (starting to see a theme ?) and met up with Katrina Gotschall, a fellow clickinmom’s member in time to see Joyce Wilson’s talk “A Golden Thread: 50 Years of Impact, Inspiration & Style.”.  It wasn’t probably the class I would have chosen for myself, but I went because Kat was going and I’m so glad I did.  Joyce is just incredible and the way she’s reinvented herself over her 50 year career, sometimes purely by mistake, was totally inspirational. A real highlight for me!

After class I had a free “porfolio review” by a PPA judge that I had signed up for before the conference. (I used my iPad which worked out great!) It was really interesting to see my photos through the judges eyes, I started to notice little “touch ups” I needed to do but hadn’t noticed earlier, and a few posing things that I can improve on.  Overall, the theme was that what sells well to clients is not necessarily competition material – there needs to be something (an emotional component?) that is more compelling. That’s something I really want to work on!

After my review, I met up with Jenny Miller on the expo floor and finally got to meet Courtney Keim and Sara Seeton, fellow clickinmoms Pro members that I had been really looking forward to meeting!   We walked around a bit and Jenny showed me this new album vendor called MemoryLink. They supply some other major album companies and their albums are gorgeous and very reasonable. They haven’t been selling direct to public for very long, but I’m really glad to know about them and will be getting some studio samples SOON. Particularly their self mount mini albums are unbelievably reasonable and cute!

I also stopped by Design revolution where I had to battle the hoards and managed to pick up a girl and boy newborn hat, and then headed over to  the Backdrop depot where I got this GORGEOUS  capturing couture camera strap:

My camera is now more stylish than I am!

That night I had dinner with the staff from  H&H (my print lab!) and I really enjoyed getting to know them in person. We have been working together on some  exciting things set to launch at WPPI, so it was so nice to put the faces with the names.  As far as quality, caring people, you simply CAN’T go wrong with these guys..It made me feel good to know that I’ve been trusting my business to people who care so deeply about their clients!

Speaking of H&H, they have new little die cut circle and mini square cards that are adorable! The square minis you can get in a super cool tin, which would be awesome for Seniors. I don’t do seniors (actually, senior photographs don’t really exist in NY!) but I immediately thought they would make great little gift tags for packaging.

square mini tin on the right

After dinner I headed over to Sara, Courtney and Jenny’s hotel room to hang out and drink wine with them and Alicia and Meagan. It was nice to have some quiet time to get to know these girls better seeing as the first time we met we couldn’t hear ourselves speak!

The next morning I went to a talk by Jason Groupp called “shoestring TTL” that I was pretty excited about… instead, it confirmed why I am SCARED of using flash – misfires, changing settings, switching back and forth between pocket wizards to fire vs. your speedlite to fire- the poor guy was having a really hard time, and the technical problems with the large screen monitors weren’t helping.

Then I had lunch with Kevin, Katrina and October (another clickinmoms member!) outside on the riverwalk, but not before Kevin shifted immediately into paparazzi mode (I can see why his brides must love him!) and got a few ridiculous shots of us in front of the Alamo:

Left to right: Katrina, October and me

But anyway, it was really nice to be sitting outdoors as our last day there was the only day we actually saw the sun.  Just my luck, I go to TEXAS and I still can’t get nice weather!

After that I headed to the airport, where the first leg of my flight to Detroit went by lighting fast thanks to chatting the time away with Minneapolis wedding photographer John Sharpe.  At Detroit I got delayed for a bit and didn’t get home to NY until until 2am! But all of that didn’t matter when I crawled into my bed and snuggled up to Jasper..

All in all I have to admit I was a bit disappointed in the quality of the classes that I took. I also wasn’t thrilled with the way they organized the class/expo schedule so that the classes had to start so crazy early.  As far as the expo, I heard that WPPI is about 3 times the size, so if I had to do it over again I might have picked WPPI instead. Certainly next year I will.

Hope you found some useful info in all that rambling, if you have any questions let me know!

(I even once had a relationship ending fight over Starbucks vs. Dunkin Donuts..so I think you can see that this is a topic near and dear to my heart!)

I LOVE the rich bold taste of the french press I make at home, but Jeff thinks it tastes like sludgey jet fuel and he’s usually out of the house anyway by the time I wander downstairs and make my daily pot.  So it was Jeff that had the idea that he wanted a Keurig so that he could make himself a quick cup to go on his way out the door every morning.

For Christmas I got him one of the models that came with a sampler pack and also the Gloria Jean “Cappucino” box figuring it would be stronger than the other blends… and then I tried some. All I can say is EWWW!  I found every variety  either heavy with some sort of flavoring as if they’d dumped in too much of those international flavored coffee mate creamers or just entirely too week or bitter!

The ONLY k-cup in the sampler pack that I found to be decent was the Newman’s own extra bold organic. Which is nice because I prefer to drink organic coffee.  So I went onto amazon to order some of that figuring I’d use it on particularly bleary mornings when I didn’t want to deal with cleaning out the french press.

But you know what? Convenience is a powerful thing.. I found myself reaching for the k-cups pretty much every morning!  So I HAD to find a k-cup that I loved. Thankfully, the amazon reviews steered me towards this:

Coffee People Jet Fuel K-Cups for Keurig Brewers (Pack of 50)

Yum!!!

It’s rich, it’s bold and it even has subtle chocolate undertones.. not in an artificial flavor sort of way though. I just wanted to post about it in case any of you were in a similar quest for a good (k) cup of joe I might save you some trouble.   If you have any other kcups you’ve tried and loved, let me know!

Hope you all have a great weekend..Next week I’ll be doing a series of posts leading up to my trip to ImagingUSA (I’m so excited!!)

See I’m trying to resist the urge to grab my iPhone for these moments – the 5DMark II (and most new DSLRs these days) have awesome video capability.. like MOVIE quality video capability, where as my iPhone has just convenience going for it.

So when Jasper does something desperately adorable, I want to be able to capture it with my Mark II!!

The problem is that for some reason Camera manufacturers assume that all of their customers own macs because the output format of these DSLRs (.mov files) just don’t play nice with PCs.   I have two .mov clips that all I want to do is combine them together with a fade in fade out and maybe trim the beginning of one. This is the sort of easy thing that Windows Movie Maker was made for. Just one tiny problem…it doesn’t support .mov files (duh, it’s an Apple thing!)

So I did a little more research and found this guy’s webpage basically saying this is a pretty tough problem to fix, unless you own Adobe Premiere Pro (very $$) or are willing to fork over $99 on the program he recommends you are out of luck.

So that’s where you all come in..short of switching to Mac (not going to happen, I just bought a brand new PC system that I love!) how the $$%$ do I edit these files? I’m willing to spend some money on software if I have to, but it has to be highly recommended and easy to use.

I know I’m not the only HD video capable DSLR owner out there that has a PC – some of you guys out there have figured this out and can enlighten me right??

I was working on some images of the Halloween parade at his daycare and left them up on the screen.  I  turned around for a second and when I turned back, he was “editing” away.  I distracted him away from the computer and started hitting control z to undo his changes when I see a change I just deleted called “toggle to black and white.”

Wait WHAT? Oh crap, I can’t get it back.. what WAS that?

I had NO idea that there was a toggle to black and white function in Lightroom 3!  Apparently it takes a mischievous toddler to unlock all of Lightroom 3’s secrets..this one was SO secret in fact that I could barely find reference to this function by doing a google search!

I finally DID find it referenced in this PDF by Lightroom Queen: http://www.lightroomqueen.com/lrqebook3-search/30pages/lr3sample-38-keyboardshortcuts.pdf

(It’s available here too: http://www.lightroomqueen.com/lrqshortcuts.php if you click on the first link.)

So, why is this exciting? Well, I can’t say that a quick desaturation is the BEST method of showing/toggling B&W, but if you remember from my post about using LR3 in my in person ordering sessions, sometimes clients will ask to see an image in B&W.   Even though this isn’t as good as a “real” black and white conversion, being able to just press the “V” key to show them an approximation of B&W is a nice, quick little time saving trick to have up your sleeve. If the client expresses interest, then you can take the time to do a real conversion.

Who needs Matt Kloskowski or Scott Kelby when I have JASPER to show me the inner workings of LR3?

:)