.:thanksgiving:.

A tribute to my 89-year-old grandmother, Josepha Fredericka Reinkemeyer Bock who is still as strong and amazing as ever. I can only hope I can be half the woman you are someday, Grandma.

.:lbcgc:.

So last night Brian and I went to the gospel choir concert. I always love going because it brings back fond memories of the choir. I remember when I announced to the exec board that we were completing turning around the choir, literally, that we were going to begin facing the opposite direction in the room we used in the BCC. Reason being, I felt like God wanted to do a new thing, and he wanted to resurrect his plans for that body. Everyone stared at me with wide-eyed doubt until Anthony stepped in and said he had had a dream the night before, and in it the choir was facing the opposite way, just as I had just proposed.

I remember praying on the floor with Shaunese through many rehearsals. I remember listening to the quiet and powerful way Kimesha would command attention when she was talking about revelations of the Lord. I remember how Anthony would look at me out of the corner of his eye and smile sometimes when I was praying and called God "Daddy". I remember Bizzie crying when we came back from MO-Statewide because she hadn't been reading her Bible. I remember Precious' many testimonies about the Lord's doings. I remember watching Rita and being amazed at how much God had grown her. I remember praying so many nights for my precious babies that year: JK, Cheron, Jaron, Terence, Kourtney, Brittany, Ashley, Deidre, Whitni, Cami, Kenny "Young Money" Steele, Samantha, Jessica, Buffy, Georgenne, Kirk, Gerald, and so many more...

I still have yet to find a body and a time unlike that sweet, wonderful year as president. I learned so much. God taught me so much. And I miss everyone. So consider this a tribute to the good old days and to the many new faces I didn't recognize at the concert last night.

.:more babies!:.

As I've stated before, when I started doing photography I never thought I'd be shooting portraits. Weddings were it. Plain and simple. Easy. But then I had to start paying attention to arranging people at weddings (it's a lot harder than it looks!). Then people started asking me to do portraits. Needless to say, I wasn't quite sold. But baby pictures? No way! Then along came Gaige, who stole my heart and was SO easy.

Today we did Anderson. Brian and I lugged all our gear over to Allie's house to take photos of Anderson, who will turn 1 on Wednesday. Earlier this week, she said "Are you sure you can do mobile toddlers, cause he's mobile..." I chuckled inside, thinking she didn't know about my secret weapon: Brian (who can seemingly entertain and keep the attention of any human under the age of 10 when necessary). But when she said mobile, boy did she mean mobile. We did several different settings and I was terrified none of the pictures would turn out since as soon as we put him in a spot he raced off crawling! It was a funny madhouse as Allie, Brian, & I worked together to get something usable. It wasn't until the end that Allie remembered that she has a magical DVD/CD of Baby Praise songs that mesmerizes Anderson and keeps him still. She put it in and it was PHENOMENAL. Instantly he stopped moving and was fixed to the screen watching these strange images of babies and rabbits pop across the screen while "Here I am to Worship" was sung softly in the background. All in all, though, we got some GREAT pictures. He was a doll. So fun.

And Brian decided perhaps he wants to start a business where he babysits for wee little uns all day and photographs them in the meantime. We'll see...

.:disappointment:.

Back in April, Brian and I learned a great lesson: BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS. Great thing is that when our hard drive crashed that month, everything important had been backed up onto our external hard drive. So all we were missing was from November 2007 & on. Nothing important was taken in that time period and the few things that were I had put smallish versions on flickr. Good! We had our fun honeymoon photos from New Orleans, our wedding, a few events we took photos at, and our friends' wedding the week before ours--the important things.

We had another harddrive scare last month and so we took everything from the external harddrive and copied it and Brian set up a raid format on our new hard drives. Whew!

I finally finished sorting through the stuff from our external that had been backed up in November of 2007 and found out that somehow, the important things we thought had been backed up on there (wedding photos a friend took for us, Annie & Josh's wedding, our New Orleans photos, and the originals of my first major photo weekend in a beautiful natural park) all of it is magically non-existent. I feel disappointed.

The bright side is that I had uploaded my favorites to flickr so they still exist there. Just not as large as I would have liked. Bummer. Bummer. Bummer.

Good lesson to learn? So here's a tribute to the few pictures I had online. Sad they are pretty much as big as they get. I had about 150 favorites. I only have around 15 left. Enjoy these remnants:

.:baby sitting:.

Brian and I did our first overnight babysitting last night. We had Gaige, our sweet baby friend of whom we did our last portrait session. We couldn't resist setting up a makeshift baby studio to try out our new pseudo backdrop. He is the most delightful, even-tempered baby ever (except for his 3 a.m. bout in which Brian and I struggled to find out what was making him scream and then to make him stop screaming! We found out today we did the baby no-no by picking him up, he thought it was time to play again.)

Candace and Eric dropped him off in his cute little Mizzou jersey last night which was, of course, perfect for picture taking! I keep telling them he needs to be the next Gerber baby! (The first photo is a remnant of my unsuccessful attempt to make him a faux-hawk this morning...)

.:pictures pictures everywhere!:.

So Brian and I have decided to take the month of December off from picture taking since there won't be a month we can do it again until next December!

We did have a fun photoshoot this weekend as we met up with a couple of other guys who love taking pictures. A few fun ones came out of it. I'll have to post them later. I never realized how much time just a simple photoshoot would take afterwards in the editing/studio process. I avoided all of my studies in college by taking and editing photos but I'm not sure I ever did it for the 40 hours + the additional 20+ hours for a side business. 60 hours a week can wear anyone out!

Thank the Lord for Lightroom. If I didn't have that, I would have quit last year before I even started.

Photos to come later. Just finished a wedding album.

.:gaige:.

So tonight Brian and I went to take our first "baby" portraits for some friends of ours. We got to use some of the new lighting equipment both outdoors and indoors and try to get creative to make it look like a studio. He is the most adorable baby. I was rather pleased with the results. This one was my favorite.

.:indy:.

Brian and I had an adventurous weekend, that's for sure! We planned long ago to go see the Pacers play the Celtics for our very first NBA game. (Brian is trying to teach me more about sports!) We booked a little B & B for Saturday night of the game in Indianapolis months ago. This week we decided we would drive 4 of the 5 1/2 hour trip on Friday, crash in a hotel in a town there, then finish the 1 1/2 hours on Saturday and explore Indy until the game.

Funny story, it had been a great car ride as Brian and I rarely run out of things to talk or muse about when 15 minutes outside Terre Haute (read 4 hours driven already) at 11:30 eastern time, we both realized we had forgotten to bring the Pacers tickets!!! We laughed at our silliness, prayed for guidance, and decided to make the trek back to Columbia, pick up the tickets, and then crash at the hotel we had reserved, as planned. So, after a quick call to the hotel in Terre Haute letting them know we'd be checking in just as they were serving breakfast, we headed back.

I'm glad that we both learned that our marriage and love for one another truly is more important than the issues that you can't change in retrospect. I love that Brian and I could have had a yelling match or blamed things on one another or cancelled the whole weekend out of anger or given up in hopelessness or travelled on with guilt but we chose to look at it with a lighthearted outlook and vowed to check for the tickets next time! So, at 8 a.m. eastern time we rolled into our hotel, which graciously let us sleep past the check out time.

The game was exciting. We were asked by several friends of both of our works to try and get some pictures of Kevin Garnett. In our nosebleed section with my 200 mm we were getting a few but nothing that I would want to give to people. In the 2nd quarter of the game Brian and I wandered downstairs to see about getting tickets to future games when a man in a business suit and his son came up and offered his tickets to us since he was leaving. COURTSIDE BEHIND THE BASKET! Brian and I were ecstatic and I was jumping up and down.

Pictures to soon follow of some live game-time shots and a few maybe of the zoo trip we took on Sunday before leaving. We did a little portrait practicing with some of the new books on lighting we've read recently.


Is that REALLY Kevin Garnett, you might ask. Did YOU take that picture, you might ask. The answers are the same: YUP. Pretty sweet, huh?

That's all for now!

.:since june:.

I was inspired to update. It's been quite some time. I am now a photographer fulltime for a company in town taking pictures of their properties (they build, develop, manage, maintain, etc affordable housing in Missouri and other states). It's been a blast so far. I've been there a full two months as of tomorrow! My job is to travel all over to take photographs and then sit at my computer all day and edit them. This is what I did in college to avoid my studies!! I never would have thought I'd be blessed enough to get hired to do it!

But, of course I still do wedding photography on the side. I almost have more weddings in 2009 than I can handle, so that's a good thing. And, as of recent, I have begun doing more portrait/family photography. (I've done 4 family portraits in the last 2 weeks so those will probably follow later.) So here's what's happened, in photos, since June (in no particular order):


My favorite photo so far since June. Emily & Ky. Their wedding photos to follow in this blog.


Becca & Josh's wedding was so fun. Both bride and groom were so relaxed leading up to their simple wedding on Rebecca's farm out in California, MO. Nature was definitely a part of this ceremony. We loved it!





My dear friend Mazvita is now serving fulltime with a ministry on campus called The Rock. We had to take photos for her newsletter. Isn't she striking? Her and her Halle Berry haircut, she calls it.
We returned from Mexico in July (see photos below) where we had met this white cat that Brian had dubbed "Hungry" that was adorable and meowed with a sad, melancholic meow. We were told not to touch the animals there so we were both sad. So Brian begged me for a week after we got back to get another kitten. Thus we made a trip to my parent's farm the next weekend and ended up with: Mr. Mostly Mittens. Shows a little of his progression. He is so onery! But he loves to snuggle, which makes Brian happy. (See photo below of Mr Mostly Mittens tucking himself into Brian's chin in his first week with us.)


Our church took a trip to Mexico and I got to serve as a translator along with another woman from our church. Life is much simpler there, and simpler opens up a whole new category of photography. I was like a kid in a candy store with my camera!







I was stunned. This is a real cardboard house (though I think it was just partly made of the cardboard and palattes, thanks be to God!) in a neighborhood we were ministering to in Acuna, Mexico.
After Rebecca's wedding Brian and I were inspired to go hiking at Devil's icebox and capture a few nature shots. It was so cool, we found this leaf just suspended in midair by an invisible string of spider web. It felt like we were in the Matrix!


As I was once over the LBC Gospel choir at Mizzou by some miracle, it's so fun to still go to their concerts and reminisce about those good ol' days as I sing along. This one was no exception!



John, our faithful lighting instructor (who is teaching us basically out of the goodness of his heart) has such an incredible wealth of knowledge about photography. Brian especially is soaking it in (I'm a little jealous of auditory learners!). This photo is from our second workshop with a three light set up in a theatre on Mizzou campus. (Another photo of Brian to follow below.) After our first workshop a month ago Brian decided that he had learned so much that he wanted to start doing photography! I never thought I would see that day! You may see some of his images on here soon enough.
This is a barn Brian and I saw on our way home from Emily & Ky's wedding in Hannibal. It was beautiful and I just had to get a picture. You always want to stop but never do. This time I did. And I'm glad. It feels so... postcardy to me, eh?My parent's horses. This first one, the white horse Sandy, is clearly sticking her tongue out at me. It made me laugh!
Fourth of July in Jefferson City. I forgot my tripod at home so this is a photo with a long exposure carefully balanced on my knee while I tried not to breathe... Thus the capital dome isn't as crisp as I would have liked it to be...

Yes, that is a pair of chocolate covered strawberries on a Texas-shaped grooms cake (who was from Texas, if you couldn't guess.) What is it with Texan pride? Why don't we have that much pride in Missouri? Emily & Ky were so flexible as we ran around for SIX HOURS before the wedding taking all sorts of photos. It was a blast and we got some AMAZING shots (see the very first blog photo for proof!) They looked like models and the lighting was absolutely perfect. I felt spoiled.






Who knew that your shutter could move faster than a flash? I didn't! Until this past weekend in Brian and I's second workshop with John
My first attempt at senior photos (and on the fly at that). Ben was a patient subject but we are definitely going back for a round two indoors once all of our lighting equipment comes in!

I took a business trip to Atlanta for my company to shoot some of their properties in Georgia. As I forgot my tripod in my car (it's seems to be a recurring habit) I had nothing to brace my camera on to get beautiful night shots with long exposures. Thus I light painted!! (There is no digital alteration or touching to either of these pictures, the latter being my hotel.) I love it!


My first engagement session of 10.18.08, Ashley and Eric were great about following me all around Columbia as I dragged them everywhere. We got some really romantic shots that I love.

My shoot with Allison & Alan was later that same day, but in St Louis. Forest Park really yielded itself to some striking images. They were such a classy pair it was hard to get bad photos even if I wanted them!




Next stop: Indianapolis!!! Brian and I are going to a Pacers/Celtics game on Saturday. Hopefully, if the mood strikes me, I'll have some pictures to show for our trip!