Gotta Hold Your Mouth Just Right...

 This sweet boy is our nephew, Graham. He worked diligently on Christmas Eve to ensure that Santa's cookies had the perfect balance of cookie and sprinkles! One of my favorite things about two year old Graham lately is the dozens of expressions he displays in about a five minute span. It is so hard to not want to have the camera in hand for every waking minute of this kiddo's existence! The cookies turned out quite delicious (Santa shared with me!) and the cookie chef just doesn't get any cuter than this one! 

What cool light

Recently I have gotten really interested in the way that light affects the dynamics of an image. As a photographer you really just learn how to use light to flatter an image. It is so neat to watch how the light affects the overall image. Using a camera you can really create a very dynamic image by adjusting a few things. For instance shooting with a really wide aperture, which creates a lot more contrast and also blurs the background. In this image, you will see that this young man is in focus, but the background is very out of focus. This image is pretty contrasty simply because the light was very directional from a sunset. I was not planning on an image this dynamic, but it is still a pretty neat image.

What a sunset

I took this picture a long time ago and intended to print it and hang it on my wall. Sometime between then and now Life happened and I am just now getting around to it, but man isn't a pretty sunset. This is actually out of the back door of our house. The blues and oranges are so pretty in this image. For some reason the sunsets in Auburn, Alabama are so pretty. I mean they are really beautiful. Sometimes I have a very difficult time not stopping on the side of the road.

Pretty Blue Eyes

This image was taken in downtown Opelika, AL. I love the way that the yellow leaves in the background contrast with Ella Kate Kiser's beautiful blue eyes. This young lady truly has some beautiful eyes. The tree in the background has become one of my favorite backgrounds in Opelika. Check out the eyes, there are like that in every image.

I said smile and she said ok

I love when people will just sit for me and let me take pictures. I like it even better when I start to take pictures and then they get interested in how the light is falling on their face. This is a beautiful picture of a friend of ours. She is certainly beautiful and this lighting is truly fantastic on her. This is actually window light that created such a dynamic image. "Dynamic lighting creates dynamic images"Cliff Mautner says this all the time. Truly an inspiring photographer. I think I am going to shoot more natural light. Nature's light is so beautiful and soft.

Piedmont Park

After much frustration with not blogging on a regular basis, I have decided that I am going to force myself to at least post an image once a week. My goal is to plan on three posts per week. For those of you that know me, know that it probably won't happen, but I am going to try. You could call this my new years resolution. This is the first post for us, I mean Amy and myself. Most times you will know who is blogging based on the grammatical errors, but you will just have to look past that. Over the weekend we spent some time with some great friends of ours who are getting married next summer. Jeff and Laura have been the focus of a lot of our pictures in recent months. We finally got a chance to go visit them in Atlanta and we took some actual Engagement photos of them. These were planned and both parties knew what was going to happen. It is a great set of images. I know that they were pleased.