A few more moments from my pre-Christmas session.

Happy Holidays

I had a fun pre-Christmas session today. I love the kids in their pajamas in front of the Christmas tree.

According to my camera, I have taken over 25,000 pictures this year. Wow! No wonder I'm having storage space issues on my hard drive . . . As the year is coming to an end, I wanted to somehow compile my favorite photos from the year. That has proven to be much more difficult than I originally thought. I had nearly 500 "favorites" on my first pass through my archives. I just had to keep paring that number down until it was something more manageable. So, here is a little slideshow of just a few of my favorite images from 2007. Thanks to all the families who invited me to capture their real moments this year.

For the first time in months, I'm actually caught up on work. What a great feeling! I actually processed some personal photos tonight. I'm way behind in that area. My family is asking to see photos from the summer that I haven't even touched.

My own kids aren't really fond of my camera. They never have been very cooperative of having their pictures taken by anyone - least of all me. I thought I hadn't taken anything good of them lately and here I found these photos hidden among all the ones I haven't had time to look through. I love this one of them laughing. It really sums up their personalities.

I just received two color canvases tonight. They are so gorgeous. This is by far my most favorite way to display a photograph. The texture of the canvas gives the photos a richness that you can't duplicate on regular photo paper.

And "big" works for canvases. I'm not a huge fan of super huge photos but I haven't seen a canvas yet that I thought was too big. These are 18x24 and 20x24 inches.

I am almost done processing all of my holiday photos and cards - yeah! I just finished this 16x20 collage for a client and decided to share - how fun is this? The hard part is deciding between the white border and the chocolate.

**click on the image to see it larger**

I don't usually blog personal stuff but today is a bit of milestone for me and in honor of that I decided to "put myself out there" as they say. I won't totally give it away, but let's just say I'm in a new decade and it isn't my 30s. There is something about each "big birthday" that causes me to be reflective and think about the previous ten years. These last ten have been huge and life changing. First and foremost, I became a mom - twice. I don't think there is anything that will ever change me more than that. There were other big events too. Relocating to a new state, 800 miles away from the community I'd lived in for nearly 30 years. Leaving the working world to be home with my kids full time. And last but not least finding my passion. It took a lot of years to find it but it was worth the wait. This is the most rewarding "work" I have ever done and seeing my art displayed in people's homes leaves me speechless.

Some more from last week in Tacoma. I miss the sun! Today's shoot had to be rescheduled because it started to snow just as I was leaving the house . . .