I was reading the Bible this morning and came across Psalm 118:24 which says

This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.

This passage was one of the common themes when we were working in Africa. The people there focus on it, and our team focused on it.
As it says in the footnotes, there are days when the last thing we want to do is rejoice. Our mood is down, our situation is out of hand, and our sorrow or guilt is overwhelming.

We have to choose how we want to react to these situations and although it’s easier said than done, we have to try to change our attitude to keep it positive. Cheridy and I have been blessed with many things…a beautiful boy, a great business, and a home that’s warm and cozy even on the coldest winter days. I’m sure that tough days will come and we hope that we will remember this verse and focus on it.

Here is a pic of some of the beautiful children that we met the first time I was in Africa in 2000. On that trip we were able to form lifelong relationships with some of the locals along with digging the foundation of a church which is now serving the community with a place of shelter and hope along with hosting medical clinics and care for aids patients when teams of people from our church head down there.

We are currently running a promotion on our fine art photography. Large canvas gallery wrap prints 24×36 and 30×45 are currently 25% off through the month of March, so this is a perfect time to get some big beautiful images for the walls in your home or office. Images can be found in our online gallery at:
http://www.arisingimages.com/fineart/index.htm

The prices in the shopping cart should reflect the discounted prices. Not all images are available at these sizes.

Here’s how a gallery wrapped image is presented. It’s an image printed on canvas and wrapped around a 1.5″ thick wooden stretcher frame and ready to hang.

We will be happy to help you choose images based on themes and/or you can come to our studio and we can show you some fullsize images on our projection screen so you can see the actual size and look at the photos large. Please contact us for more information.

Today we also got to photograph the London family. We met them a few years ago when we did photos of Noah when he was around 1 year old. He’s now much bigger so it was really fun to catch up with the London’s, see Noah, and meet the newest addition to their family!!

Today we did a photo shoot with the Smith family. Steve is a friend of mine from a former Bible Study group that I led. He and is wife Laurel adopted these two beautiful kids from Russia a few years ago. In the afternoons, Gabby likes to be a princess and she dresses up in flower girl dresses as part of that fantasy. It’s really neat to be able to have captured that fun, quirky phase in her life.

This afternoon, we did some head shots for our friend Chris Ygay at Revitalize Day Spa. He’s the owner of the spa which is located in Birmingham. If you’re looking for massages and other spa treatments, definitely check them out!

This weekend we had a fun weekend up north with some friends of ours. We went up there with Gracie and Tony who are friends of ours that we haven’t spent any time with in a few years. Jeff and Tricia and Bobbie and Keesha are friends that we met because we photographed their wedding’s earlier this year and we really hit it off.
It was definitely memorable!
We had some plumbing issues in the house we had rented that caused a bit of a flooding problem. However, despite that, we still had a great time and all enjoyed each others company!! We played some games, had some snowball fights, and made a ridiculously good breakfast on Sunday morning!!!

I love this guy!!!

(and apparently he loves puppies.)

This morning we did our first INYH (IN Your Home) portrait special. We had a great time with our friend Julie and her two boys.
Here are a few of the photos from their shoot:

Today we had the chance to get together with our friends Brett and Anna one more time. They are really getting their business ramped up and needed some head shots so we did a photo shoot with them today. We planned on doing it outside but it was just ridiculously cold today so we stayed inside and did a bunch of pics.

We just recently launched a bunch of new websites that do a much better job showing off our photos.
Our main site (www.arisingimages.com) is still the main hub, but it splits off into our new wedding site (www.arisingweddings.com), our new high school senior site (www.arisingseniors.com), our new babies site (www.arisingbabies.com), and our new kids site (www.arisingkids.com). We really felt that our website is one of the first points of contact for a lot of our clients so we wanted to have an impactful website that showed large photos with fitting music. We’re very excited to have this completed.

Last night we got to hang out with our friends the Phams. Don treated me to the Pistons game and we watched them blow out the Pacers. I’ve never sat so close at a Pistons game before. I didn’t know that at the closeup seats you get a waitress to bring food and drinks…that was pretty cool.
Cheridy and Joanne hung out at their house.
Don and Joanne are from Take 1 Productions (www.capturingthemoments.com) and they were recently named in the top 25 videographers in the world…not too shabby!! Their work is amazing!!!

This evening we had a wonderful meal (Cheridy’s fav-Olive Garden) with our new friends Brett and Anna from MyExceptionalEvents.com. Anna is a fantastic wedding coordinator and Brett is a business guru. They recently moved their business up to Michigan and I would put money on it that they will do really well with their drive and dedication. They’re two smart cookies!! After they left, I told Cheridy that I would buy stock in their company if it was available.
If you haven’t heard of them, check them out!
I’ve been trying to do better with taking more personal photos to post on the blog, but I forgot once again, so I stole this one from their website.

This photo was taken by Zuma photography who is an awesome photographer out in Utah.