Some flowers to all you mothers out there…especially to my mom!  As I say every year, I couldn’t have a better mom!  I love you! xoxo Denise

Since you’ve seen my newphew’s great photos, now I’m going to show you my photos.  Due to a ‘glitch’ with my camera that I had with me, I had to use my iphone for most of the day on Saturday. There are a lot of people that love their iphone camera, but I have to tell you, I’m not one of them.  One of the corners of my camera is consistently blurry, so either the lens is dirty or scratched or something, so in every picture one of the corners looks bad to me. 

I’m celebrating a milestone:  My blog is now one year old on this site (I’ve had other sites and have been blogging, consistently, for about 4 years) so I went into my stats to check my numbers of visits for the past year….I’m shocked to think that so many people have stopped by my little blog.  I had started blogging just because I’ve always taken a lot of pictures, and I wanted a place to put them.  It was OK if no one looked.  At first, I had about 5 visitors to my site PER WEEK!  Now I get  hundreds and hundreds  etc etc each week and I’m honored that so many people stop by to look.  I do think, however, that I’ve let myself get away from my original purpose, which was just to make myself take and post pictures.  2010 was crazy, and looking back I only really posted events.  One of my personal goals, for 2011, is to get back to what I loved which was taking pictures for my personal enjoyment.

I have seriously cut back on my weddings for 2011 and with all that I have going on in my life, I’m hoping that will allow  me time to actually take pictures for FUN!

Continuing on with my testing of the new Kodak Portra 400, I continued by testing in my garage (of all places).   I wouldn’t call the light in there “nice”  so I was curious to see what these shots looked like.  I can now say that this film handles blues beautifully.  More tomorrow when I move my testing inside.

Kodak revamped it’s professional film line and came out with a new Portra 400. It was released within the past couple of months, I bought some, and tested it.  These shots were taken outside, on a sunny day, with my Contax 645, some new Hoya macro filters and the Kodak Portra 400.  Look at the results!   Shooting at f2 (for those of you who care, that’s how most of the picture is out of focus) on purpose.  More to follow on upcoming days!  I really love the colors. 

Veronica and Wally got married months ago in June.   They had an amazing day.   I didn’t fully blog their day at the time as I was submitting their wedding to Brides.com and they assured me they were going to publish this wedding online in their “real weddings” section. Well, I’m not sure if it’s happened yet or not, but I just could not wait any longer to blog this amazing wedding. Veronica did her own flowers….

Here’s part 2 of Meghan’s photo shoot!  The  farm was lovely….

I met Meghan last weekend at a local farm, Fertile Green Farms, to do her Senior photos.   FGF is always so kind to let me shoot there –the property is so beautiful and full of amazing places to shoot.  It was great spending some time with Meghan…it made me long for my senior year and all the possibilities that life holds at that time!  (OK, it really just made me wish I were younger!) Here’s Meghan is who does have her whole life ahead of her.  She’s super sweet and, as my pictures show, beautiful as well! 

Rich is one of my second shooters and I like working with him since he’s so fun to talk to and he takes GREAT candid shots!    Here’s a shot I found at Tiffany and Aaron’s wedding a few weeks ago.  I saw this shot and waited for someone to walk by so I could make it happen; that didn’t work out, so I made Rich go stand in the exact place I wanted him at.  What do you think those lines overhead are? 

Heather and Joe got married last week and I was super excited for their day….knowing that I’d be laughing a lot!   We started off at the salon where Heather and some of her girls were getting their hair and make-up done.   Heather was very calm as the stylists were working on her hair.

Happy Friday!   About a month or so ago we went to visit my dad.   I took a film camera (Contax 645) and took some shots while I was there.   Here’s  Norman sitting on the deck on what was a rainy day.  I decided to finally post these today because, due to all the rain, I remembered this shoot!  I do like the light on a rainy day…especially with film.