robin gale cornett (a photographer for babies, children, and families in fort myers, florida)

I never got to share any of my daughters’ ballet studio Holiday Show images on here yet, so I’m blogging them today, admittedly with a dual purpose. If you are a blog subscriber, you may not see the difference in the email or feed reader, so click on through to the blog and you’ll see that things look just a bit different around here.

First, a shout out to Dance Bochette, the studio: this was the studio’s 59th annual Holiday Open House. That is quite an accomplishment, isn’t it? Their spring performance is really something special, in an auditorium with stage lighting and guest artists; the holiday show is a little more casual, at a local church’s gym (hence the backgrounds), but it is always delightful. I love seeing all the different ages perform–they are usually delightful and this year was no different! Click the arrow right there in the center of the picture and enjoy just a few of my favorite images from this year’s show:

The second purpose in this post is to show off my newly upgraded blog! There is so much I could say, and some of it I’ll share for a future post, but ProPhoto Blogs has been my blog theme for over a year and a half now, and the newest iteration, ProPhoto3, came out today! I have to say, every iteration of this theme has been better than the one before it, and they have all been pretty outstanding. Some of the crazy awesome new features include:

• built in slideshows (see above), meaning having a slideshow in every post is super easy (before, every post took me several steps). I also don’t have to count out an exact number of images for every post like I did before.
• I can have a sidebar! Or not! I’ve chosen to have a sidebar on my home page, but not on individual post pages. I like that I can rearrange the site to have things like my twitter feed in the sidebar, and the tag cloud, so that you don’t have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to see some things. I love that I don’t have to sacrifice the yummy big images for the actual post. If you’re on the home page and want to see the pictures bigger, just click on the post title and you’ll get the full page spread.
• built in “social media” icons–I like the wood grain myself, but there are some other nifty options, or, if the creative bug strikes me, I can make my own. That one probably won’t happen for me, but it could!
• I like gravatars, I admit it. Now I can have them in the comments. Do you have a gravatar? If not, go get one!
• If you are really finicky and want to have everything on your blog “just so”, you can. I haven’t even scratched the surface with my site, y’all, but there are places for you to put in custom accent images, add backgrounds to the content area, not just the standard page background, custom post separators, all kinds of things.
• And of course, if you want to, you can make everything all lower case. Or not.

If you have been on the fence about buying the ProPhoto theme, please hop off now and get it. You don’t have to know any code to trick out your site seventeen different ways–if you can edit a picture in Photoshop, you can do this, too. Apparently my referral code needs to be updated–when I have a new code, or if the current one works (RCORNETT232), I’ll update that information here. But the referral code should save you $10 (not on the upgrade price, but I’d upgrade regardless. And apparently if you bought P2 since 12/1/09, your upgrade price is only $20).

update: The referral codes are working again, so if you want to use mine, RCORNETT232 (in all caps), that will save you $10. Thanks!