Our Elf was livin it up this morning. Apparently he had to report some unfortunate events to the North Pole, and felt the need to wash away his sorrows with some booze!

I’d never been to the Botanical Gardens in Bellevue before and I have to admit, I was smittin from the moment I arrived.  This place is amazing. The fall color, which was just one fall storm away from being gone, was incredible. 

It was a pleasure photographing the ”F” family.  The leaves made a wonderful vibrant background, the only downside was the constant drizzle.  Thank you “F” family. I’m finishing up your images and will have them in a gallery middle of next week.

Another fabulous shoot at Golden Gardens, this has become one of my favorite locations. We were all praying for a dry day, and somebody upstairs was listening. The rain started as we drove off at the end of our shoot. Talk about luck!

Of course this family didn’t let a little inclement weather spoil the day! I had a great time shooting this family. We ended with some really fun shots.

I’m booked out for the rest of the year. I look forward to more sessions and building my business in 2011.  If you recently had your photos taken, I quote 2-3 weeks for images in a gallery. I’m behind on posting to the blog, but rest assured I’m working on your images.

Thank you for visiting my business website (and yes there will be a bit of personal on here too). With the kids in full time school mode, I am investing my time and efforts into my passion for photography. I am currently retooling, getting additional mentorship and education as well as portfolio building. For my portfolio, I am currently focusing on bellies, babies, and children. After the new year I look to expand to other areas like family and senior photos. As I continue to grow, I am continually emerging my personal style. Thank you for visiting, please drop a line if you would like more information, want to hang out, drink coffee & talk shop, or just to say hello as you pass by.

Fall sessions are a bit tricky here in the Pacific Northwest,  you never know what you are going to get! After being “rained out” the last few weekends,  mother nature got it right today!   Here’s a sneak from this evenings session.  I’ll have more up soon!

I thought it would be fun to show what a SOOC and an after photo looks like after editing.  My photo skills and editing skills are still evolving. I use Lightroom 3 and CS4 for editing. For this particular image, it’s a quick down and dirty edit using layers in cs4. I mainly wanted to warm it up a bit, give it a little pop of color and soften his skin. Original photo taken on a tripod with wireless remote, iso 160, f3.2, 1/400. Using the tripod gave me a great advantage to engage in conversation with Scott, and not have my face hiding behind the camera.  Only bad thing is my current tripod is not strong enought to hold my new camera and lens, when holding the camera vertical it wants to drop the camera towards the ground. This means my next purchase will be a much heavier tripod.

I’m WAY behind on editing, I’ve been so busy lately! I had the great pleasure of meeting up with the amazing gals from 2P’s for a weekend getaway (for me it was a staycation). We rented a house in West Seattle overlooking Alki.  We thought we had picked a great time of year for our out of town visitors, but apparently the weather was not in our favor. We ended up breaking rainfall records over the weekend! Regardless of the record rains, we all had a great time!

Here’s one of Tyler modeling for a pack of smarties. Amazing what you can get with candy!The other is of a newborn shoot I did a about 6 months ago.

One of our favorite things to do is hop in the car and go. There are so many wonderful pockets around Western Washington to enjoy. Today’s agenda was West Seattle, Royale Cupcake was the first stop. Anything else was a bonus.

We ended up hitting Alki after Cupcake Royale. We walked along the waterfront. Stopped at a place where there was a wedding proposal in the sand. After that we drove through some of the neighborhoods looking at houses like ours, yep 1950′s ranch with Roman Brick. Looking for paint color inspiration and a way to add a bit more curb appeal. Found lots of houses like ours, but no inspiration.

After that we hit the Fremont Troll. Never been, but totally awesome. Busy too. Lot of foot traffic, which made it a tad difficult to get a photo without “extra peeps”. I had to clone out the woman on his shoulder!