.: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!