I’m excited to be gearing up for my third year shooting for our local MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers) group for their spring fundraiser! For the past two years, we’ve done this ninja style, borrowing an incredibly gracious family’s backyard (all right, we took over their entire house, I admit it), and I spent 2-3 days rolling around in the dirt taking pictures of all kinds of cute children. It’s been a ton of fun, but we were all ready for a little something different this year. This year, we’re stepping back a little bit, but really focusing in on just our (beautiful) children.
The theme: Simplicity. We’re setting up a very simple “room” and just having fun! We expect our kids to show up happy, silly, goofy, and laughing. If she wants to bring a favorite toy (exhibit A: my husband’s “Pooh Bear” from when he was a child–his mother saved it for us), or the rain boots he won’t ever take off, that’s awesome. The dates are March 5 & 6.
Of course, when I think of children and cherished objects, I think of my five year old and her pink blankie. This hasn’t always been her go to blankie–when she was a baby we had a small one with ladybugs and her name on it, and another that had castles and fairies, but as she grew, she decided she needed a bigger one. I think the important part of the combination is her thumb, anyway.
I do recommend that you go a step or two beyond what I did with my girl–seeing as how I didn’t brush her hair or wash the red marker off of her index finger (the index finger right under her nose). Oops.
If you are a local mom and want to support our MOPS group and get some beauteous pictures of your children (you do not have to be a MOPS member), you can sign up to be part of this event on the MOPS of New Hope website (don’t ask me for coupons or times or anything, because I don’t know). All of the coupon sales benefit MOPS of New Hope, and so does a portion of the proceeds from print sales.
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:
1263762220
456
684
456
684
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!
I met Rachel and her awesome family in downtown Fort Myers just before Christmas to shoot some senior pictures and family pictures, too. I decided I’d just show off Rachel here (and wow, did I have a hard time narrowing down how many pictures I’d use for this post!). Picking the images for the post was hard, but Rachel certainly made my job as her photographer super easy! After this session, I was wishing two things: 1) that I could go back and do my senior session over; and 2) that I had ever been, even for just a minute, half as gorgeous as Rachel is. I would probably also take back my spiral perm, so make that three things.
Sorry about that confession. But I don’t miss the spiral perm and all the hair that went with it one bit. Rachel (and family!), it was a pleasure!
We flew up to the DC area last week to spend Christmas with my family, which is always fun. What made this year really special was that we went up within days of the huge east coast snowstorm, and the snow was still on the ground and quite deep. It was an unusual treat for my Florida babies, who have seen snow, but never played in it to this extent. I think this was their first snowman, and definitely was their first sledding experience (the girls were a little concerned about it). They also had some fun snowball fights:
I hope your holidays have been wonderful as well! I personally am looking forward to a peaceful New Year’s Eve (I confess, a movie night at home sounds like just my speed!).
I have a box of Cornett Christmas card goodness on its way to me right now, and if I am able to figure out how to print labels from my address book on my computer (I don’t remember what didn’t work last year, but I ended up writing them all by hand, and we’ll just say there are more than ten people on the list, plus my handwriting is only marginally better than Andy’s, and calling his chicken scratch is being kind), they’ll be delivered before Christmas. And for me, that’s something I can feel good about.
Of course, getting my own children in front of the camera takes some hard work and persuasion (they are happy for me to shoot soccer games and ballet recitals, but just them? Not so much.). And bribery. I promised that I would take some pictures of them with our new “puppy”. “Puppy” would be because he’s bigger than my youngest, and possibly bigger than both of the girls at this point. Having the dog along just made life a little more interesting. Overall, they were pretty cooperative, and I love the Christmas card I designed, which I will show you on the blog after they’re sent out. I thought I’d share some of the outtakes with you.
Can you even believe the molars on our dog? Yikes!
< older posts
|
Love the new blog!
by robin cornett
7 comments