Quinn at one year old.

A few weeks ago I got to spend some time with one of my oldest friends, Katie. We traveled together to our hometown to spend the weekend and go to our class reunion. She lives almost at the half way point for my trip so I stayed the night at her house to help break up the 10 hour trip. It also helped greatly when traveling with a 2 and a half month old. Katie's little boy, Quinn was turning one the weekend after our trip, so on my second night there on the way home I took some pictures of him in his environment doing his thing to capture this time in his life for her. The light was perfect and the photos turned out great, even though it was the end of a very long day for the little man. Here are some of my favorites.

He has such a great smile. I think this is my favorite.

Love those big blue eyes and the food all over his face. That is classic one year old eating.

I love the interaction between the two and this shows the fabulous light we had.


Always on the move and very quick.

Couldn't quite get the bike to stand up on his own.


The baby gate, Quinn's own personal jail.

Big week

Life with a baby has been filled with a lot of sleepless nights as to be expected I suppose. That is until this last week. Dylan has started sleeping through the nigh. It just happened all of a sudden. Every night this last week he slept for at least 7 hours. Well every night except for the one we were camping and he did not sleep at all. I think it was just too much excitement for him and some very long days. We took our boat to the Dworshak Reservoir. We went about 10 miles up toward the North Fork of the Clearwater River. Then we were met by some friends on 4wheelers and rode about 12 miles up to camp and stayed the night. The pictures below are from this day. The first is one of my new favorites of Cory and Dylan. The second is a family friend, whom I think is Dylan's new girlfriend. They were quite taken with each other. We then borrowed a pickup came home, worked, well Cory worked I tried to get some sleep. We went up the next day to repeat the trip in reverse in one day. That was one long day. Dylan did great though. He loves being on the move. One other exciting thing during our trip was that I finally found some great view sights of the reservoir from which to take photos. I can't wait to get back up there at sunset and shoot. Hopefully it won't be too long and I can post about that. Now hopefully we have another week full of rest filled nights.

Happy Father's Day

Life has been so busy and crazy these last few months. I am now a mommy and have been very busy taking care of the new baby, Dylan. He has been quite a challenge. The poor kid has acid reflux and colic. He is getting better and is not quite so fussy now and actually slept about 7 hours last night. That was quite a victory. I think it was his father's day present for his dad. The last few weeks I have been able to start taking pictures again, that is of something besides Dylan as much as I love that. So I will have something to post about now besides just the baby. So happy father's day to all the dads out there, especially my husband on his first father's day and my dad his first for being a grandpa.

Iceman Relay 2009

So the little town where I live is bringing back their yearly winter festival. This was the first year in several years that the festival has taken place. There were many activities scheduled that took place including night sledding on the ski hill, snow sculpture contest, iceman relay, bonfire and chili feed, kids activities, hay rides, and snowmobile fun run. The Iceman Relay was sponsored by the Pierce Gem Team, of which Cory and I are members. So we helped with the race. It is a three person team sponsored by a local business. The first leg of the race is one mile on snow shoes. The second is about a 3/4 of a mile run up and around a hill and then sledding to the bottom. The third leg is a short run and then a total immersion in the creek running through town. The third leg is where Cory and I were helping out, so I got some great pictures of people jumping into about a 37 degree creek with snow surrounding them. These are a few of my favorites. More are listed under the gallery-events section of my website. I have made them available for download if you so wish. Just right click on the pictures you want and select save. All in all the event was a pretty big success for the first year. We had seven teams competing and a large crowd at the finish line. Everyone had a great time. So If you happen to be around next year you should definitely check it out.

Drawing Winner

Congratulations to Colleen Nelson who won the drawing for a free sitting fee that I had at the bazaar this last weekend. The bazaar went well. I sold some pictures and got my information out there to the local community. I already have booked some sessions to take place soon. It also gave people a chance to see what I had been doing all summer for the last four and a half months while I was away. I have been pretty busy with the store and getting ready for visitors for Thanksgiving. So hopefully I will have more time to blog after the holiday. Hopefully showing some work for the sessions scheduled coming up.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Well, I did not do a very good job of keeping up with my goal of blogging 2-3 times a week. I did on the other hand accomplish a lot last week. I got new business cards designed and order. They should be here this week. I also decided to set up a booth at our local bazaar coming up next weekend. So I have been getting ready for that. I also managed to get out and go shooting Friday down by the Dworshak dam. I have not had time to download the photos yet, but hopefully will be getting a few of those up this week in another blog. There were several other exciting things that happened last week as well including my first ultrasound to see the baby and my dog coming home after having been gone for two and a half weeks. So all in all, I did get a lot did get a lot done in one busy week.

Getting Motivated

Journaling has never really been my thing. I have a hard time keeping a journal going. In fact I was kind of against this whole blogging thing because of that reason. It seems though that blogs by photographers are very popular these days and are suppose to be good for business. So I am going to give it a shot. I am hoping making myself blog at least 2-3 times a week as a goal will help keep me motivated. Which is something I am sorely lacking today.

After several days of working on my website. I have hit a wall. I have been working with html, which I know next to nothing about. It has been frustrating to say the least. For now my website looks close to what I want, but it is not quite there yet. With a little more work hopefully it will be done, but for now I need a break. So here I am as I have no motivation to do anything else today. It is a very dreary and rainy day outside, which is not helping at all. Hopefully it is better for everyone else out there, but if not and you are dealing with such day as I you can go check out my new website so far. Let me know what you think. I actually am pretty impressed myself, being that I really didn't know what I was doing. So now I feel a little better having accomplished this post. I am off to see what else I can get done while the mood is right.