It is like the movie Groundhog Day, with every day being just like the day before. (Well, that is what I’ve heard the movie is like - I’ve slept through it no less than 3 times.) My yard is starting to turn into a lake. It just keeps on raining, and raining, and raining.

Seriously? It is getting old.

I still haven’t figured out how much rain we’ve gotten this month so far, but I was just *thrilled* to learn that June is normally the month where we get the most rain. So maybe there is some hope of it ending sometime? I really hope so. I need some more sunshine in my life!

I graduated from high school back in 1987. Whenever I sign up for things like Facebook and they offer to help me find my classmates, I laugh. I’ve never once found anyone I’ve known online. Not for the school I graduated from here in Houston (in a class of almost 600), or from the high school I attended my freshman & first half of my sophomore year in Illinois. (Go, Bishop McNamara!) So when I was setting things up in my Facebook account last week, I really was not expecting to find anyone I knew.

And for once, I was wrong.

Back in high school, I had a friend named Liz Henry. She was cool, different, a free thinker, and someone that hated all the typical high school cliques. She was a lot stronger than I was, and I admired the crap out of her for it. Plus she was just freakin’ awesome. Smart too - so smart, she graduated early. And with the craziness that is senior year, I lost touch with her.

Until now. She was one of 4 people that graduated with me that showed up on Facebook. She was the only one that I really knew of the one that showed up on the list. Before I added her as a friend, I spotted that she lives in San Francisco now, and I decided to check out her contacts - only to see several people that I also know! Of course, I had to send her a message through Facebook right away, and we’ve exchanged a few emails. Turns out we were both at SxSW this year, and we didn’t even know it.

Whoa! What a small world. And amazing to think that 20 years later, we both have the same fabulous taste in friends. It still amuses me every time I think about it! I guess I’ll have to stop mocking the social network sites when they offer to show me people I might know!

(In case you wondered, you can find her at http://liz-henry.blogspot.com/, among other places.)

I know the geekosphere is clamoring for the iPhone. Everyone seems to want one. Well, everyone but me.

I don’t want one, and it is for one very specific reason - the reason that Apple says is the cool thing about it. It has no buttons. No keys for dialing a number. Just a screen. I know from personal experience, that form of phone sucks.

Years ago, I had an attachment that plugged into my Handspring Visor and turned it into a phone. Awesome! One device, and it can be my organizer *and* a phone! Sweet! Awesome! Yeah, not so much. See, sometimes I drive a car. I have my mobile device of choice nearby so that if it rings, I can answer it easily. This was never very easy without buttons. And if I needed to dial a number? Forget it! You are very conditioned from years of using a phone to dial it without even looking at the keys. You know where the 9 is, where the 4 is, whatever. You can do it all by feel - but not when you don’t have keys.

I love my Blackberry Pearl. It is so great and easy to use. I can dial, I can text, I can easily respond to full emails even. No problems at all with it. I love the shiny sparkle of the iPhone, it is all glittery and pretty - but I’m resisting it. I really don’t want one. I would be happy to play with yours though, if you’re willing to share!

Karen dubbed it “The Blogger Wedding of the Year! ™” on Twitter, and it definitely lived up to its name! Jim & Leia’s wedding was such a beautiful, intimate affair held in the backyard of their home in Dallas, Texas. They invited a small core of family and out of town guests to the ceremony, and then for the reception they opened their house and had a great big PARTY! From the toasting beer mugs to the chocolate fountain, fun was had by everyone that was there. Oh! And there were cupcakes, with goodies to decorate them with! The weather threatened all day long to rain them out and force us all indoors, but the tent went up early, the weather cleared up for us, and aside from the slightly soggy ground which liked to eat the high-heeled shoes, it was a lovely day.

Ah, good times, good times. It was such an honor to be asked by Jim & Leia to share in and capture this very special day in their life! And as an added perk, a huge box showed up from Amazon yesterday with my very own chocolate fountain! How cool is that? Now I just need to figure out where to get one of those cool blow-up microphones. Then our party set-up will be complete!

Click here to view the show larger! (Really, I’m trying not to double post everything that goes on the Fresh Photography blog over here, but this one? Oh, how could I resist!)

On Sunday, June 10th, right after returning from the Elevate and OneLight workshops in Orlando, I had the fortune of being able to visit Alexis and her family for an in-home portrait session. Alexis is an adorable 14 month old, and she was so beautiful it was hard to stop taking her picture! Matter of fact, the last few in the slideshow are from when she was having a post-shoot snack on the kitchen floor - my camera was still handy, so I had to take just a few more!

One of the most fabulous things about taking photographs in the client’s home or at a favorite location is the opportunity to include things that are very special to them. Alexis has a frog toy and a dress made of matching fabric by the same designer. Her room is so cute, decorated in coordinating fabrics. When I spoke with her mother, it was one of the first things that she requested - capturing the dress with the frog in the room. We got two out of three, as Alexis was not going to cooperate with us and sweetly hold the frog!

Another perk of on-location photography? Alexis is not a big fan of strangers. Matter of fact, they have tried before to take portraits at a studio, and I think they only got one or two shots out of the experience. Instead, I was able to come in, spend time with her, talking to her, letting her play while I chatted with her mom, easing her into things before I pulled out the big camera. Our session was well under 2 hours long, and we left with almost 100 images after editing! (Ok, I could have cut out even more, but how can I possibly resist that sweet face!)

I look forward to hopefully visiting Alexis again in the future!

If you’re interested in booking a portrait session, please use the contact link above or call. Sessions are not limited to Houston; contact us to discuss details!

Whooooooosh!

I feel like that is the sound of time whipping past me. My to-do list keeps getting longer, and I seem to slowly be getting things marked off of it, but only slowly. *sigh*

My parents are staying at our house right now; construction is well under way at their house, and while the painters are working there, we let them escape the craziness by coming over here. I spent most of the afternoon there today, and my eyes are still burning from the paint fumes! So I’m glad we’re giving them a break from all of that. Let me tell you though - if you’re ever considering remodeling, don’t. Just stop. Sell the house and buy a new one. I swear, it would be so much easier! (I say that, and yet if I could live in some great craftsman style home and the price I had to pay was fixing it up, I would totally go for it. But that is different, somehow. I’m not sure how, but it is!)

So in the past week I’ve installed a new shopping cart over at the Fresh Photography site - you can see it by going to the “Client” area at the top of the page. I’ve edited and uploaded Leia & Jim’s wedding. I’ve edited and uploaded Idalis’s photos, my latest newborn shoot. I’m about to finish editing and uploading Alexis’s photos, my latest toddler session. Elaine & I went to shoot a bar last Wednesday for a local magazine - details on that to follow once the issue runs. I then did another shoot for them on Friday of the bartender of the month for the next issue.

All in all, life is fabulous - but so busy right now! I am not complaining at all - I just need to catch up and stop adding more to my to-do list than what I mark off of the list each day!

We’ve added new art prints to the Artwork section of the Fresh Photography site! We have lots more to add too in the near future. Many of these have been available for purchase over time at the Yale Street Art Market that we participate in each month in the Heights, but over time we have so many prints available, we won’t always keep them in stock - but they will always be available on the website!

Check them out, and feel free to leave comments - we love to hear from you!

Now I’m off to work on creating several Flash slideshows for the portfolio section - weddings, engagement sessions, newborns, toddlers - lots and lots of photography!

Whew.

Where has the time gone? I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without posting anything here!

I went to Orlando to attend a workshop called Elevate with Garrett and Joy Nudd. It was AMAZING. We talked shop, we talked gear, we talked business stuff. We brought in everyday people and a few that want to be models and had photo sessions, including a “shoot out” where we worked with our “clients” (models & not models) for 30 minutes at a time and then switched who we were working with. It was fantastic! I then followed that up by attending OneLight with Zack Arias, which was an intensive 16 hours of learning. Yes, 16 hours, although really we went for nearly 20 hours - and it was the 20th workshop. How appropriate is that?

I’ll post more about all the great wedding photographers I got to meet and work with later this week. Right now, I’m still a bit scattered from the end of the week.

Murphy had the large abcess in January, and he never seemed to fully recover from that. Then, on the second to last day of school, we took him to the vet because he was not eating or drinking anything and was completely lethargic. He had lost 4 pounds, going from 12 lbs. to 8 lbs, had a low temperature of 99 when it should have been 101 or so. We ran tests, and nothing came back from them - his kidney functions and everything else seemed to be fine. They said then that the infection from January could have spread to anywhere, or it could have just been a matter of not recovering completely - they really did not know. He spent a few days there in their hospital, and after a night of IV fluids he was doing better and eating again.

I knew when we brought him home though that he was not ok. He walked as if he was drunk, stumbling and weak. He had lost a lot of his spirit. You could tell he wasn’t feeling well, he wanted to be off alone. You could just tell.

On Friday, while I was still in Orlando, Mike told me that he wasn’t eating again, would not drink water, and was just in bad shape. As I tried to leave Florida (after 1.5 hours of circling the Ft. Lauderdale airport in a tiny plane), Mike & Jason took him to the vet. It was clear that while they could have tried more things, he just was not going to recover. Once I finally landed, we all talked, and agreed that having him put to sleep was just the right thing to do. It was such a hard, hard call though.

I had mentally told Murphy goodbye before I left as I really knew he was not going to make it, but it was still hard not seeing him one last time. It is even harder on Jason, as he was his cat really, and they had such a sweet bond. It is hard for Mike & I to see Jason so sad, and we all miss Murphy.

I swear, I keep seeing him. Every time I walk past his favorite chair to sleep in in my bedroom, I see him out of the corner of my eye. While it makes me cry every time, it also gives me a bit of comfort to see him happy and well as he used to be, not sick like he was in the end.

So it was a good week, ended by a really hard weekend. Now we are part way into June, and I can’t believe I’ve written nothing here in that time. I guess I just needed time to recover from it all.