Happy Holidays!

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday season!  Best wishes in 2009!  Melissa

A first for me...

I have been wanting to photograph a maternity session and was planning to seek out a few soon to be moms in 2009, but I lucked out and received a call last week!  It was a Thursday night evening session and I was excited and nervous all at the same time. I have seen so many beautiful images showing the beauty of pregnancy and I wanted to create a few beautiful images for the M family.  They were so laid back and easy to work with I think we captured the images they were hoping for.  Here are a few of my favorites from their session! 

Thank you M family for trusting me to photograph such a wonderful time in your lives!   I will be touching base again soon once all of the images are ready to view.  

A few of my own

I just thought I would share a few images of my girls from this holiday season.  My "models" are so great at tolerating their mothers' creative whims :) Here are a few of the images I have captured so far...

It's beginning to look at lot like Christmas..

So the snow has arrived and wow are my girls excited!  My 4 year old, Jenna, was ready to suit up at 7:30am and play outside in the snow!  Sister Sara is not quite the morning girl that her sister is, but the snow was quite tempting for her too! And both girls can hardly wait to build a snowman.  Their excitement is what I love most about this time of year!  

And then...here comes mom (me!) harassing them to take the annual Christmas card photo. This is not usually met with too much excitement on their part (except for the bribes that usually come along with it :) Oh, and I am not above a bribe...or two!  And I usually have a few ideas brewing so I may do a few sessions (oh they love that..) before I capture the images I want to use.  And this year my goal is to include our dog as well - so we have LOTS of bribing going on...even for the dog:) But I am having a great time & I am excited to share my family with all of you this year!  

Family Fun!

This has truly been such a fun fall for me!  I have the opportunity to photograph so many different sessions including children, graduating seniors, newborn sessions and of course families!  This fun day I photographed the S family including grandma and grandpa.  I just love when grandma and grandpa are a part of the session.  It is so much fun to watch them with their grandchildren and capture some of those fun moments!  The entire session was just pure fun for me!  Little CJ has grown so much since I last saw him and his big sister Grace brought along a special tiara and stuffed kitty to have a special photograph taken.  She even knew exactly how she wanted to pose.  How cute is that!  Here are just a few of my favorites!

It was wonderful to see all of you! Thank you for making my work so much fun!  

A great day to be Spartan!

As I drove to meet the M family at their home, MSU was trailing Wisconsin and things were not looking good for the Spartans.  When I reached their home we talked for a little bit and I checked out their beautiful backyard for the best image locations.  Then  I photographed their son Moose and dog Otis while daddy was watching the final minutes of the game (I was thinking their would not be many smiles today).  However, just as we finished photographing Moose a loud cheer came from the basement, we saw jumping and yelling and went to check it out.  The Spartans won by 1 point in the final seconds - it was a great day to be a Spartan (even though I am technically a Boilermaker:) Great weather, great win and great images!  Here are just a few of my favorites!

Thank you so much for allowing me to capture some beautiful images of your family!  It was great to see all of you and I had so much fun!  

Happy Halloween!

It is that fun time of year again!  And who doesn't love Halloween :)  And I love it even more when both of my girls are agreeable and excited to be photographed without even a bribe...the painted faces and getting dressed in their costumes were bribe enough this time :)  I just had to share one of my 2008 Halloween favorites!  My little kitties were totally into it with the growls and claws.  Sara my black cat is 6 years old and Jenna my tiger is 4 1/2 years old! And they can hardly wait for tomorrow night! Have a safe and Happy Halloween :)