Photo Shoot

In the midst of enjoying my wonderful photography class, I get an email from someone who had found my Craig's List posting and was interested in doing a family shoot. I was ecstatic. December and January had been completely dead for me with absolutely no shoots booked, and minimal contact from potential clients. This gave me a reason for me to continue to work to make this business happen. We had visited the Shasta ruins back in January when John's family was here to visit, and I found some really nice spots that I made a mental note to return to for a future shoot.

I had the family meet me there and we spent just under an hour walking around and taking photos. I think I was my most relaxed, and was able to have new creativity for some photos as well as a new eye for details in the photos along with the bigger picture of the shoot. They were a gorgeous family and I had a lot of fun. After doing more Photoshop tutorials and googling and spending a lot of time this week editing, the shoot is complete! I feel like again, I have been able to put in what I have learnt and come out with probably the best shoot I've done so far.

Here are my favourites:

Studio Shoot

In my photography class last week, we also got to do studio shoots where we used softbox lighting to illuminate our subject. Having taken no photography education whatsoever, this was all completely new to me and also very enlightening! Though I am a bigger fan of the more natural, outdoor shoots, I enjoyed the fact that this completely controlled the amount of light you needed for the shoot.

Having booked my first wedding shoot this summer, I thought about an idea I had seen from a friend. He had been to a wedding where they had set up a studio shoot for all the guests. They had empty frames that they used as props and they made a really fun addition to the usual guest wedding photography. It gave me an idea to try something similar to this for the wedding this summer. However, softboxes can run as low as $300, if you want a good one, to as much as $1000 for a really amazing one. Since I am so new in this photography business, I can't even fork out $300. However, I do have an ingenious husband and the internet!

Almost right away, I discovered online multiple sites with step-by-steps and pictures on how to build your own softbox for as little as $50. We are going to look into this option to see if it's even feasible, with the current equipment I have, but I am excited to potentially have a studio set-up available if I need it!

Here are my favourite pictures of the shoot (Kira Armstrong, daughter of Heather Armstrong, who teaches our class):

Photography Class

I've been working on developing a photography business for the last 6 months. I've had four shoots in total (two paid, two for free), and I have one tomorrow and I just booked my first official wedding shoot. I've been struggling with my lack of technical knowledge, as well as editing knowledge, and feel like I just needed to figure these things out before I could get to the level where I want to be.

I am currently a part of a 5 week photography course at the School of Ministry of which John and I are a part and we did some studio shots last week. While waiting for my turn, a few of us went outside and practiced on each other as well as on some kids that had been brought along specifically for us to practice.

I enjoyed the shoots, and was excited to see the final product. I had fun editing and I think I've come up with my best work so far! I'm so excited to see that somehow I've improved and gotten closer to a level that I've been wanting to for a while!

Here are my favs:

The long-awaited blog

This one has been a long time coming. I can finally blog about being pregnant, about the 13 months we spent trying and about how excited we are for this baby.

The journey to make this baby was at first fun, then tear-filled, ironic, difficult and required lots of patience. In the 13 months we tried, I think I seriously had at least 2 friends get pregnant every single month. Every time I ovulated, we had guests or were traveling and in a place of not really being able to "try" to get pregnant. My cycle was sporadic and by June, when I skipped completely, I realised it was time to get this checked out.

At age 29 and 11 months, I found out that I had Poly-Cystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), which means that due to some hormone imbalances, I sometimes did not ovulate, or I ovulated late. Fortunately, I have a mild case, which means that most of the time I do ovulate whereas there are women who can not ovulate for years. We were very lucky to have a mild case even though we were still recommended to visit the Fertility Doctor two weeks before we were going to lose our insurance and move to another state. Our options were limited, but at least I was still ovulating.

We decided to continue doing what we could do to make this baby and trust that we could still get pregnant. Arriving in Redding, surrounded by Bethel Church and new friends, we were covered with amazing encouragement and prayer for our little one.

Lo and behold, on January 11th, 2010, we were pleased to find those double lines appearing on our pee stick! We're due Sept 17th.

We are excited for the arrival of this little one and feel that we have learnt a lot during this trying to conceive period. I feel like I went from wanting and trying to have a baby to the realisation that we are going to be raising a little person. I went from thinking we're having a baby to we're going to be parents. I liked that it made me think more intentionally about what kind of parents we wanted to be, and how we wanted to raise our kids, and I feel like we continued to learn more and more about parenting during the 13 months. We're excited to be at the beginning of this wonderful journey of parenting!

Some pix from our day of celebration.