Dec 24, 2010 | Announcements, Children's Portraits, Family Portraits, Personal, watch-me-grow portraits
We asked our clients to go back through the year and nominate their favorite images to become our 2010 Images of the Year. We posted them all to our Facebook page for votes and after a week of voting we have our winners! The votes were really close, and we have a few ties, so there are 11 images rather than just 10!
I am so happy with the image that was selected as our 2010 Image of the Year. This was from our “In His Shoes” portrait special for Father’s Day and little Aiden wore his Dad’s military gear. Aiden’s dad was stationed in Iraq for the last year, but I am so thrilled, overjoyed and excited to say he arrived home last week just in time for Christmas! This image was created as a surprise for his dad and I know how much it means to his mom. I was so proud to create this for them and I am honored it will be something that they will treasure. It is an image that really has a special place in my heart and so many people have mentioned how much they love it since we first showed it on Facebook. So, without further adieu…. our 2010 Image of the Year!
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Sep 22, 2010 | Personal
Many of you are on my Facebook page so you have gotten updates all along the way, but for those of you who aren’t on Facebook… here is what has been going on. My dad had to have a valve in his heart replaced last Thursday. Because of his history we had to go to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for the procedure. His operation was last Thursday morning and everything has gone amazingly well. It will still probably be another week before he and my mom come back to Tallahassee, but we are already seeing a lot of improvements in dad’s health.
I had always known that my dad had been born with a heart problem and had surgery when he was a baby, but until this trip I never truly understood how revolutionary it all was and how hard my grandparents fought for him. When he was born he was called a “blue baby”. His heart had a hole in it between the chambers that did not allow the oxygenated blood to circulate well enough. This type of heart defect caused the babies to have a blue color, like when you hold your breath WAY too long. For babies born in 1942, this meant they would certainly die before the age of 10, many before the age of three.
At Johns Hopkins, the head of pediatrics, Dr. Taussig, went to Dr. Blalock and his lab assistant Vivien Thomas to encourage them to find a way to save these babies. At this point, no surgeon had ever performed open heart surgery. They created a procedure which takes a vein from the leg and bypasses the problem in the heart. After Vivien Thomas perfected the operation on dogs they had enough confidence to operate on a person. In November 1944, they performed the first open heart surgery on a little girl who had the same condition my dad did. When my grandmother heard the news she got on the phone until she was able to speak with Dr. Taussig and convince her that my dad needed this surgery.
In 1945, my grandparents took my three year old father to Johns Hopkins and he became the 13th person in the world to have open heart surgery. The surgeries that they performed at Johns Hopkins on babies like my dad was the beginning of all cardiac surgery. From what we can find out, of those first babies, my dad is the last surviving. He has now had a total of four heart surgeries, with three of them being at Johns Hopkins. I am so thankful for the amazing surgeons and visionaries at JHH and also for my stubborn, never yielding Italian grandmother for fighting for her son. I knew much of this story before my trip, but seeing the amazement of the residents, the head of cardiac surgery, etc. it really hit me how special it all was. 🙂
Sep 15, 2010 | Children's Portraits, Personal
I have been really trying to “practice what I preach” this year and keep my boys in front of the camera as much as I can. Sounds silly, I know, but photographing your OWN kids is so hard! I feel like I can photograph almost any kid out there… except mine! None of my tricks work with them! This is actually the first New Year’s resolution I have stuck with though, so here is the latest of what I think are the two most awesome, adorable, amazing boys in the universe!
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Aug 28, 2010 | Announcements, Personal
Thank you to everyone for the kind emails and FB messages making sure we were OK, since the blog updates were a bit slow this month. We are more than fine, we are great! Just crazy busy! 🙂
At the beginning of the month, we traveled to Orlando for the Florida Professional Photographers’ annual print competition. The results were super exciting for us! We entered albums for the first time in competition and BOTH of our albums received merits! Then, at the banquet we learned that our albums had placed second and third statewide in their category. Then, we received the Reedy Album Award for first time entry of albums! To say were were shocked is an understatement! Two of my prints also received merits, so it to put it mildly, it was an absolutely amazing competition for us!
I was also recognized at the banquet, receiving the Outstanding Service Award for the work I have been doing with the Tallahassee Professional Photographers’ Guild. Coming back to Tallahassee, Olyn and I had a short amount of time to prepare for the program we were presenting to the Guild on workflow and time management. That presentation was last week and was a great success! We are now scheduled to travel to other guilds to teach more photographers!
Olyn and I are completely overwhelmed with gratitude and emotion to this great group of photographers we have the pleasure of working with, learning from and giving back to. Through their support and guidance, we have both become better photographers. Thank you so much to our clients for their support, their cheerleading and their excitement. Sharing our successes with you is so awesome! And a HUGE thank you to our families who are the people who keep us sane! We are truly two of the luckiest people in the world!
Aug 28, 2010 | Personal, watch-me-grow portraits
Well, our little guy is growing like a weed! He is crawling everywhere, pulling up and actually trying to walk. I am in shock– he is only 7 months old! I thought I would have a little more baby time than this! I am proud of him, but man, I kinda feel cheated!
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Jul 26, 2010 | Children's Portraits, Personal, watch-me-grow portraits
Ok, its time again for me to be the proud mommy and show off my little boy! 🙂 Ethan just turned six months old, but the little goober seems to think he should be walking already. He is desperately trying to crawl and can already pull up to his knees. It means my days of calm baby life are coming to an end! Any day now he is going to take off! So, while he is still relatively stationary, I thought I would use him as another model for our angel portraits.
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