I hadn’t taken an “official” portrait of my two children together since spring. I looked back to link that blog post here, and realized I never posted it. Here they are last April:

Do you see how they’re both smiling so cute for the camera? What little angels. Evan is always a little a little angels for pictures now. He’s 7 and old enough to understand to cooperate. My biggest challenge with him is getting “real” smiles vs. posed ones. Campbell was a bit more of a challenge, but she was about 11 months old there and still pretty willing to sit and be held and was amused by silly voices.

Fast forward a few months to this fall. Evan is still cooperative and willing, but Campbell is now almost a year and a half old. Here are a few things she doesn’t like doing: standing in one spot, posing, smiling when not in motion, sitting in one spot, laying in one spot, kneeling in one spot…you catch my drift. I took around a million shots (okay maybe 80) and this was the best I could come up with. It was actually the very first shot I took. When going through the images, I initially passed over it, as Evan’s arm is kind of at a weird angle, Campbell’s finger is on her mouth, and my neighbor’s house is in the background. However, after looking through the rest, I realized it was the ONLY image where both kids were looking at the camera with a pleasant expression on their faces. So, I did some quick photoshopping and cloned out my neighbor’s house, and came up with this:

Not perfect, but it’s the best I could do. I’m not sure if I will have the energy for Christmas portraits this year; we’ll see.

I just love lorikeets, don’t you? They are my favorite thing at the zoo.

My favorite day in Morrison is Harvest Hammer and Paint the Town day! The Harvest Hammer is a 5K and duathlon. The Scott family was well-represented this year with Chris, his mom, and me running the 5K and Evan and his grandpa being partners in the team duathlon (Evan ran, Grandpa biked). On my side of the family, my aunt and cousin walked in the 5K, and of course we knew a lot of others in the race. It was great fun!

I won’t bore you with all of our family photos, but here is one shot of Evan finishing his race. Chris was first overall in the 5K, but ran back to run the last mile or so with Evan. To the far left, you can see me in the white tank top. Yes, my 7-year-old beat me! I ran in 29:03 (I was going to blame my slow time on the fact that I just started running in June but honestly I’m just a slow runner). Evan’s time was 6 or 7 seconds faster than mine, which is pretty good for those short legs! He will take after his dad, I guess! He beat his PR by about 30 seconds for the 5K.

I am partial to Dr. Seuss.

Look at me, blog posts two days in a row. Let’s see if I can keep this up. Here’s a shot of my husband finishing one of his Xterra races (he’s the runner). He won first overall in several this summer and just finished up a stellar season. Yes, I’m bragging.

I am not taking near as many snapshots of our daily lives since taking a break from my Project 365, so I am starting it back up! This time around, I’m switching things up a bit by using only black and white pictures and only natural light (no flash). If you are not sure what this project is, I explained it on this blog post: 2010 Project 365 (by the way, I did finish and do all 365 days of 2010).

My new images are on my  Project 365 Blog, and here is Thursday’s!

Sometimes I get so wrapped up in getting the perfect, framable shot that I forget to take these kinds of images. They are my favorite kind of all. This situation was all wrong, photographically speaking…poor light, I’d let someone borrow my “good” lens and flash so I was working with only natural light (and not enough of it) and a cheap lens…but it doesn’t have to be “all right,” all the time. Sometimes, just capturing the moment is what matters. These images make me happy.

My sister-in-law and her newborn baby boy. So in love already are these two. And so in love with them are we.

My Campbell feeding her baby doll while her aunt and uncle cuddle babies of their own. A shot of nothing and everything all at once. This is life. LOVE.

Obviously I have camera gear capable of taking more than your average snapshot. However, as any of you with an SLR camera know, these cameras are not exactly easy to tote around. Even with my most lightweight lens, my camera still weighs about 400 pounds. Okay maybe 5. But still, when I have the gear of two kids to carry around, the last thing I need is something else that is heavy. Therefore, I own a small point and shoot camera that I got on sale for $90 at Office Max.  It is about the size of my smart phone, and I take it whenever I want to travel simply. I can take pictures with one hand. I can stuff it in my pocket. I can drop it and not cry.

But it takes crappy pictures.  I have actually owned 4 pocket cameras, and I’ve never been happy with any of them. A couple of them cost close to $300, but they still were not great. I guess once you have an SLR camera, nothing else compares.

On the Facebook newsvine (which frankly is about all the news I get lately), I have been seeing several people with really cool i-Phone picture apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic.  I do not own an i-Phone. The service in this area wasn’t good until recently, and I have been happy with my non-iphone-carrying cell service and don’t want to switch. But, I have i-Phone picture app envy. These apps make everyday snapshots look a combination of retro and interesting and artistic and just all-around fun.  Today while reading a blog that I love, I discovered a link to some Instagram actions for Photoshop. I used them to convert some of my crappy point and shoot and cell phone pictures to fantastic pictures. Okay, maybe fantastic is a stretch, but they are better. Much more fun!

Here are a few crappy point and shoot camera pictures (I wrote the name of the action on each image). Several of them have a white border, which doesn’t show up on this white-background blog. Oops.

Cell phone pictures:

My son rarely cooperates for photos, and I haven’t taken “official” birthday portraits for some time. However, he did give me about 15 minutes to take a few the other day.

Not great light here, but he wanted his picture taken on this mini excavator

Back when I started my photography business, I decided against selling digital files. I like handing over the final product. Control-freak that I am, I do not like not seeing the final prints that the customer will be hanging on the wall. It’s like an artist that sells a piece of art that is 95% finished, and he lets someone else add the last few brush strokes. Scary stuff.

But, I know it’s the new millennium, and people want digital files. In 2009 I started selling a digital collection, and it’s been hugely popular. The big worry for me is where my clients will have these images printed. My monitor is calibrated with the pro labs that I use. It’s a delicate process. The files I sell come with a release to print anywhere chosen, but there is a HUGE difference between images printed at Wal-mart, Snapfish, etc. and a pro lab. Most pro labs only offer their full services to people with a business license, but several have a separate branch of their company for regular consumers. A couple of examples are www.mpix.com and www.smugmug.com. I’m sure there are others, but these are two I’m familiar with. When my clients purchase digital files, they receive a custom CD of the files in the mail, but I also upload their images to Smugmug. This allows them to print from Smugmug and use their lab (Smugmug is not free to use; Mpix is). It also allows for things like immediate downloading of files, remote linking, and easy photo sharing.

Until now, my one and only digital collection contained all of the files from the session. Alternately, clients could purchase a single digital file. I realized that I needed something in the middle for those who needed more than one file, but couldn’t afford the whole works. Here are my two new collections:
The Digital Mini I – 10 full-resolution digital files
The Digital Mini II – 5 full-resolution digital files and either a 5×7 or 8 wallets of each of the 5 images

And since no post is complete without a picture, here’s a shot of the start of the Easter Seals 4 mile run a few weeks ago. The guy in the Loras singlet ended up winning. My husband is the one in the red shoes.

In honor of Earth Day, please consider cloth diapering your baby! We have cloth diapered both kids and we love it. We use a combination of Fuzzi Bunz, BumGenius, and Kissaluvs with Thirsties covers.  I don’t have a cloth diaper picture, but here’s a onesie-back view picture where you can see a cloth diaper pumpkin butt underneath!