You Love Me Anyway

It's been a tough week.  Fear, doubt and Satan chasing me. Whenever that happens I flip on The Fish and this greeted me just when I needed it. Thanks for coming through again Abba...

You Love Me Anyway
                    ~ Sidewalk Prophets

The question was raised
As my conscience fell
A silly, little lie
It didn’t mean much
But it lingers still
In the corners of my mind

Still you call me to walk
On the edge of this world
To spread my dreams and fly
But the future’s so far
My heart is so frail
I think I’d rather stay inside

But You love me anyway
It’s like nothing in life that I’ve ever known
You love me anyway
Oh Lord, how You love me
How You love me

It took more than my strength
To simply be still
To seek but never find
All the reasons we change
The reasons I doubt
And why do loved ones have to die?

But You love me anyway
It’s like nothing in life that I’ve ever known
You love me anyway
Oh Lord, how You love me

I am the thorn in Your crown
But You love me anyway
I am the sweat from Your brow
But You love me anyway
I am the nail in Your wrist
But You love me anyway
I am Judas’ kiss
But You love me anyway

See now, I am the man that called out from the crowd
For Your blood to be spilled on this earth shaking ground
Yes then, I turned away with this smile on my face
With this sin in my heart tried to bury Your grace
And then alone in the night, I still called out for You
So ashamed of my life, my life, my life

But You love me anyway
Oh, God… how you love me

You love me anyway
It’s like nothing in life that I’ve ever known
You love me anyway
Oh Lord, how You love me

You love me, You love me
You love me, You love me
How You love me
How You love me
How You love me

Baby Eden

Well here she is... some of you may remember the maternity shoot of the very beautiful Susan. Welcome sweet Eden. 

Father & Son Shenanigans

WOW! Am I WAY behind on blogging or what? So.... I've been saving this shoot specifically for this week. Why you may ask? Because it's a Father's Day week silly!  I was asked by these characters to capture some portraits back in March so we headed down to the tracks and goofed off for a while and let me tell you... these two could go PRO at goofing off! I'm surprised any of these were in focus because I spent most of the time giggling hysterically... thanks Chris and Garrett!

This is Chris' chosen form of discipline

We were gonna put a penny on the tracks and when Garrett bent down to place it there we found one already smooshed!

Baby C

Look what I got to play with! The precious 3 month old baby C...

A Look Back

I was cleaning off one of my hard drives recently and ran across these pics that I took a year ago.  They had mysteriously been shoved into an obscure folder. I took this trip to California (home) almost exactly a year ago. I spent that week in tears spending some time with my sweet Daddy. But I did try and get out with my camera a bit to capture a few pics.... I tend to use my camera as a filter. Whenever things are really painful I whip it out and go on an expedition to distract myself. Also, I wanted to have some pics to show my kids of the place where Mommy grew up. I was a lucky girl.....

Sailor Bar on the American River

Many happy trips to San Francisco always ended up at Pier 39

The iconic Golden Gate from Chrissy Field

Transamerica Building... where my mom used to work

Ding Ding... y'all want some rice-a-roni now dontcha? 

Went through Napa to Bodega Bay for a quick day trip.

Light

Alright...
Any fool with a camera knows that you need LIGHT to take any kind of decent photograph.  I've always been a fan of natural light but I'm always looking for any info on using artificial light to enhance my images.  I've got strobes and softboxes etc etc.... I prefer to leave them at home if at all possible but I like to be versatile, expand my knowledge.  Occasionally I'll come across an article that offers some 'helpful tips' in this area.  Now to ME the term 'helpful tips' implies simplicity but any photographer out there will tell you that learning about lighting is the single most complicated aspect of this craft.  So, today I ran across an article on a blog that was simply titled "Portraits with Electronic Flash", sounds like it could be helpful... I take portraits with electronic flash! What little tidbits can this article offer to help me improve my images. So I begin with the first paragraph... Light is important... etc etc... Then by the third sentence I run into this doozie...

All light behaves in accordance with the Inverse Square Rule that states that light’s intensity decreases by the square of the distance from the subject or more simply that light gradually falls off if the light source is far from the subject and rapidly if the light source is close to the subject.

You don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to figure out that this can have an impact on the quality of light too.

HUH??!! Now my brain is checked out... and who is Stephen Hawking? I may not have to BE him to understand the impact of light but who do I have to be to understand what on earth you just said dude? I'm a BIG fan of plain english. The second you start using math terminology by brain goes into the twilight zone... WARNING WARNING!

Chris 2011

Back in October I met up with Chris for some senior pics.  We were all over downtown Gallatin in and out of alley's and then made a trip over to the greenway. Here's a few of my favorites...

Expecting

 Hands down one of my favorite shoots of 2011 thus far.  I met the beautiful Susan back in August when I photographed her little man's two year old pics. I've had the honor of returning a couple times since. I like being their photographer.  They are truly a lovely family and I've got a crush on Noah and I cannot WAIT to meet Eden (is that not the most enchanting name!) ...

He wanted to try on baby sisters hat... This just cracked us up!

Noah has got the most beautiful eyes... he inherited them from Mama

BOY OH BOY!

 Just before Christmas I got together with the Borcert brood for some family pics. This was their first ever session as a family so they were super excited.  Janice called me to schedule and specifically requested a barn and then she called me again to tell me she'd found one! And what a great find it was! Couldn't have found a more perfect setting for a family filled to the brim with little boys. We had fun playing around in the tall grass. I just can't resist a gaggle of boys so I was crawling through the grass with them. Here's what we came up with...

Told you we had fun!