Today we had another engagement shoot. It was a lot colder today than it was yesterday and while we were out doing the shoot it started to snow really hard which was awesome! We love shooting in the snow and Lindsey really likes the snow too, so it worked out great!!

Today was a busy day shooting engagement pictures. It was cold outside but not TOO cold, so we were able to do most of the pictures outside. In the morning we took pictures of Evan and Mary who had a great time laughing with one another.

Then in the afternoon we shot some pictures of Adam and Natalie who were a bit nervous at first, but they did just fine and we were able to get some fun pictures with them.

Today we did a photo shoot with the Goetz girls. Their parents are good friends of ours from our church. Angela works at our church and Allan is actually the owner of the company where Cheridy has her part time job. Their kids were just WAY too cute!!

This weekend Cheridy and I went up north with some friends of ours. They were couples whose wedding we shot this past summer (Ron & Amy and Tony & Becky). A friend of mine let us rent his cottage for the weekend and we went up there just to hang out and play games, watch movies, and just relax.
It was a lot of fun!!!

Here are just a few photos:
I just love birch trees and love to photograph the white bark against the blue sky

This is the cottage that we were at:

On Saturday the guys decided to go for a walk. We were right on a lake. Tony and I weren’t confident that the lake was frozen so we just walked around the edges. Ron was a little more daring and decided to walk across the middle. We met up with him closer to one of the edges where he fell through the ice. Luckily he was in a really shallow part and it only went up to his knees. It’s a good thing he didn’t fall through in the deep part. By the time we got back into the cottage the bottom half of his jeans were frozen solid. This picture is of the ice where Ron fell through and is put up here as a reminder to not walk on thin ice!!!

There was a rope swing tied to a tree outside and Ron and Tony took turns swinging around while I took some photos. Here’s Tony getting some air!

Cheridy took this photo of Tony, Ron, and I being goofy.

Here’s our group photo we took before leaving to go home and get back to the grind.

Cheridy and I are currently sitting at the airport on our way back from San Antonio. We’ve been down here for the last few days taking classes for business and marketing at a photography convention. As usual, we learned a ton of good stuff that we now need to take time to implement.
We were at the Professional Photographers of America (PPA) Imaging USA convention. We spent every day from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm learning and now our brains are full.

One day we went to the food court for lunch and we met a homeless guy name Joe who we asked to join us for lunch. We sat and talked with him for a while. It turns out that he was a Katrina victim and he actually was down in the 9th ward during the hurricane. He said that he was in a boat and there was another guy with him. At one point they past someone that was in the water who couldn’t swim that was going to drown. Joe said that the guy that was in the boat with him dove into the water to try and save the other guy but they both ended up drowning. Joe sat helpless in the boat because he couldn’t swim either. Nobody should have to witness something like that. It was a good reminder to us of how good we have things.

On a less depressing note…
the weather down in San Antonio has been crazy. When we got here, it was 70 degrees and humid. Today it is 29 degrees and freezing rain. Lots of flights have been cancelled, so we’re hoping that we can get out on schedule. Texas doesn’t get ice storms like this…in fact, a lot of the homes have their pipes on the outside of the houses so there will probably be a lot of people calling plumbers as the pipes froze and cracked. I’ll post some photos of the ice when we get home.

UPDATE:
We just got home…our flight left on time and went really smoothly. We just feel bad for the people that were stuck there. Lots of flights were cancelled. We met people that were had been at the airport for two days and met others that were told that their flights were cancelled until Saturday and it’s only Wednesday today. Anyway…we’re counting our blessings!!

Here are some pics from San Antonio:
The Alamo

The Alamo

The Riverwalk

The Ice

The Ice

Our 2006 “Year in Review” newsletter is online. It can be viewed here:

http://www.arisingimages.com/temp_folders/newsletter_2006/

We went downtown again today to shoot some more pictures for a campaign that the Salvation Army is working on. I just love all the color and texture on some of the buildings.

We’ve just partnered with a new company who will be managing our mailing list that we can use to better communicate with our friends, family, and clients. If you are interested in signing up, please use the link below:

http://www.arisingimages.com/information/contact_us/mailing_list/signup.htm

We are in the process of surveying all of our clients from 2006 to find out things that we did right and wrong. Based on the feedback we get, we might implement some changes to make the overall experience even better for our clients. If you were one of our wedding or portrait clients and did NOT receive the email, please feel free to click on one of the surveys below and fill it out if you have some feedback for us.

If you hired us for a portrait shoot, please use this survey:
http://www.arisingimages.com/information/contact_us/portrait_quality_survey/index.php

If you hired us for a wedding shoot, please use this survey:
http://www.arisingimages.com/information/contact_us/wedding_quality_survey/index.php

Today I spent most of the day overhauling the Fine Art section of our website. The initial appearance might look the same but the entire behind the scenes has been redone with a new shopping cart interface which should be more userfriendly and easier for me to update with new galleries. We’re really hoping to build on the sales of some of our Fine Art photography. The fine art images can be viewed here:

http://www.arisingimages.com/fineart/index.htm

Here are just a few favorites from trips we took earlier this year.

This was taken at a small lake in Connecticut. I went on a week long road trip to photograph fall color and any other unique scenes I could find.

Cheridy and I went to Florida because we had some free plane tickets that were going to expire. This shot was taken at South Beach.

In April we went to South Africa to do some medical missions work and I was able to capture this photo of a child in the grass just sitting and watching some other kids playing.

In August I had a photography convention in Chicago that I went to and I headed into the city to shoot some city scenes one evening.

This next shot was taken in Las Vegas when we were there for a different photography convention.