Bringing painting into our business will hopefully eventually lead to a unique and exciting product that will add a significant amount of depth to our product offering. Turning images into paintings is a difficult and time consuming process that requires artistic and technical ability far beyond photography. I know I still have a lot to learn in this realm and with more practice, I am excited about using this as a future product line.

We had an interesting photo project at church today. They are making a video to the song “Beautiful” and wanted some photos of some of the members from our church to use in a slideshow. It was a very odd type of portrait session because we had about 30 seconds with each person and one light source with a reflector that we brought. We shot about 75 people and it was a lot of fun…shooting people young and old from all different nationalities and backgrounds.

I just bought a book called Painter IX for Photographers by Martin Addison to help me in my process to learn Painter.
Below is a sample image from their tutorial CD that I painted using Painter.

We received our infrared camera back from repair today and I’m very excited about using it for our upcoming wedding season. For those that don’t know, and infrared camera will only record light in the infrared spectrum. Things like trees and grass give off lots of reflected infrared light on a sunny day and end up glowing white…it’s really cool!
Here’s a test image I took outside our front door:

Our church Kensington finally finished construction on their new chapel a few months ago. We’re friends with the architect John Tagle who needed some photos of it so I went and took a few shots. Below are a few of the interior and the rest can be seen at the following link:
The Chapel pics

Today I took my photography students to the detroit zoo to practice using their camera’s in a real world environment. It was very cold outside today so it was a welcome change to go inside to some of the indoor parts to see the birds and otters and just warm up a bit. But…going in from the cold causes cameras lenses to fog up so that caused some more problems. I didn’t take too many pictures today because I spent most of my time trying to help people with their cameras but I got a chance to shoot a couple posted below. For anyone interested in taking my photo class, you can preview the book that I wrote for it here: http://www.arisingimages.com/learn/photo_class/main.htm. The current class will be over in a couple weeks at which time we’ll start up a photoshop class.

This morning at church, Jason Hansen from the Detroit Lions presented the message about envy and jealousy and provided a unique perspective…that of a successful NFL football player who supposedly has it all. It was a very interesting message!
After church was over I took a short drive to take some pictures of the winter scenes in the area. We had a very wet snow last night that stuck to all the trees and made everything really beautiful.

Since everything looks like it’s going through with the new house, we’re going to be selling our condo in Warren…so if you know anyone interested, send them our way.
1600 sq. ft. / 3 bed, 1.5 bath / attached 1-car garage
The rest of the info can be found on our MLS listing: 26016485