Truth be told, I am also a proud sister-in-law. But I confess, I’ve been itching a bit to get my hands on Rabia’s site, so I was happy when she said she was ready. Here’s a screen shot of what she had before–pretty simple and clean, but needing some pizzazz.

Rabia is already a super faithful blogger, much better than yours truly. It wasn’t necessary to do anything with her content; we just needed to make the site more faithful to who she is as an author. Yes, Rabia is an author, primarily fantasy, with some fairy tales thrown in…lots of imagination to spare. She actively blogs about writing, homeschooling, and things that pique her interest (like watching Avatar: the Last Airbender with her kids right now). She pretty much gave me permission to do whatever I wanted to, which is always nice.

What I wanted was to give her something that was still clean, professional, and easy on the eyes, but bring in a touch of personality. We’ve incorporated custom fonts, a clean color palette, and custom post types, for starters. Under the hood, where you can’t see them, are some improvements, too: integrated comment threads (because Rabia is fabulous about replying to comments…this functionality is actually built into WordPress already, but she’d been using a plugin to manage it, possibly because of the old theme?); built in search engine optimization tools; and she’s now using the built in WordPress custom menus. We were able to shed several plugins, which may not excite you, but it does me. Mainly, though, the site is more powerful, tidier, and cleaner. And it’s prettier.

Don’t believe me? Check out Rabia Gale, writer at play, in action.

I wanted to share a few of my favorite images here with you, but you can see more of them at the Dance Bochette website.

(If you are wondering, a special floor was built for the performance, but my eye was really captured by the dancers’ reflections in the marble floor of the art center. Really beautiful!) The concept and choreography for the show was by Alyce Bochette; the lighting was by Stuart Brown; the show also featured original poetry by Jim Brock and video by Rodney Woolsey.

On the photographer’s end, however, it’s really really hard, because every slideshow is set to music, and one thing you can know about me right up front is that I am not musical. I don’t actually listen to a lot of music, even though I love it, and I have no sense of rhythm, either. Just being real, here! John King of Metta Audio is super musical, though, and he just saved my sorry self, because, get this: he writes music and now sells royalty free music for photographers, and what’s even better, he includes custom timings for ShowitWeb (remember, I said I had no rhythm? Sad, but true!). Thank you, thank you, thank you, John!

So, for the visiting photographers, check out John and his work on my little slideshow. For the potential clients who are visiting, check out Betty’s family, the new and improved version (family, not pictures)! Yes, the gorgeous redhead, Megan, was David’s girlfriend for this session. She is now his fiancée!

My first edit:

Dirty Pictured (Dirtied Picture? What’s the appropriate verb?:

Original (clean and lovely but kind of austere):

Dirtied (I really love how this one warmed up):

I have to say, I really enjoyed the layout and interface of the plugin, and I loved that I could make it render previews of all the textures using the actual image I was working on. It made it super easy to decide right away which textures I was interested in using and which ones I might have to delete from my computer entirely.

I really liked how the presentation turned out–very clean and elegant, a lot like Karen’s work.  I won’t show you the whole thing, but I thought I’d share the first and last slides, just because I liked them.  The first one uses an image which is actually from Karen’s store (no, I did not take this picture–a very talented local photographer does the interior shots for Karen and his images are stunning), along with a blown up version of the store’s logo.

We wanted to keep the last slide simple, so we took the Inspire logo and recreated Karen’s fun business card (yes, they are square!).

If you want to see more of Karen’s work, visit her design site. The store site is here.

Well, I had the opportunity to test drive a custom framing service, which happened at the perfect time, just as I had ordered a print of this shot. I will say that my idea of framing is normally to just find something that’s cheap at Target and just go on from there, but you know what? Some pictures are just worth the extra time and cost to have a frame that is as good as the image inside it. For me, this one was completely worth it.

Julie, a friend of mine, has been a Creative Memories consultant for a few years now, and since I don’t scrapbook (at all), we’d never really talked about anything else she might offer. However, when she called and asked if I’d be interested in looking into some custom frames, I jumped at the chance. I went to Julie’s house, although she could have come to me instead. We spent quite a bit of time digging through a big selection of mats and frames, looking for just the right combination.  The choices were pretty overwhelming to me (hey, this is the girl who owns five white t-shirts to solve any matching issues when I wear something that’s not blue jeans), but Julie was really helpful about trying different combinations and widths of mats, etc.

She shipped off my print and when it was shipped back to her, she delivered it to my house.  Wow!  It looks awesome!  The framing is nice and sturdy; the back is completely finished; it’s already wired and ready to hang.  The entire effect is stunning.  Here are a couple pictures (although I should have taken a shot of the back as well; also remember please that i shoot children, not products, but at least my bed is made!):

My one regret is my own fault, not Julie’s: I wish I had done a bigger print because I love this image and I love the presentation. Anyway, if you have a nice big print that needs a quality frame, please contact Julie through her website or by email.

What happened was that last year, I took a trip up to Memphis to see dear friends Mark and Mylissa, who have started this ministry for families with terminally ill children.  Many of these children are patients at St. Jude, some are at other Memphis area hospitals (Le Bonheur is one), and some are scattered around the country, but so many of these families have dropped and/or left everything to try to save their children’s lives and feel very isolated.  Habitat for Hope, Mark and Mylissa’s ministry, reaches out to these families to let them know they are not alone.  They pray with them, take them meals, visit the hospital with them–the list is kind of overwhelming.  They work tirelessly and ask for nothing in return.

Anyway, I flew up for Labor Day weekend last year to have a few family sessions and see their work first hand.  I was there for a birthday party and the final game of the Memphis Redbirds’ baseball season (supporters had donated a block of tickets to Habitat for Hope) and spent the weekend taking lots of pictures.  I have to say that I came home and collapsed.  Their schedule is truly exhausting.

I knew that the story on Habitat for Hope was in the works and I knew they were using my pictures, but all the same, it was very exciting to see the newsletter.  Here’s a link so you can see it too.  Here’s the picture from the back side, the one that caught my eye–one of my all time favorites: