This afternoon I was working with some of Ralph and Devon’s photos and there was a photo of the Taj Mahal that they took while in India and I absolutely loved it!  I spent the afternoon playing with the photo in Corel Painter and Photoshop to turn it into some artwork.

Here’s the final:

Here’s the original photo:

As many of you know, one of my passions is landscape and travel photography and after some of our trips, I’ve designed some albums using some of those photos.
I have decided to try to share that passion with some of our clients.  Many of our clients go on exotic honeymoons all around the world.  When you’re not a photographer, it’s hard to know what to do with all those photos when you get home.  What we’re going to be offering is the honeymoon album.  What that means is that I take all your photos and pick the best 100-200 images and retouch them so they look great and then make a really cool album out of them which willbe the same

I just finished the first one last night and it was a fun project.  One of our couples in May went to Dubai for their honeymoon. Below are just a few of their album spreads.
The thing that was really neat about this is that their album design turned out really good in spite of using an old camera.  Ralph was shooting with an old 1.2 megapixel sony point and shoot camera.  The images needed a lot of photoshop but ended up looking awesome when done!

The photos that were sent over were just regular point and shoot images. One thing we never do is mix other peoples personal photos into albums with our images. However, doing a whole separate album with images given to me by someone else was a fun project.
Here’s a few samples of the images that Ralph sent over:

As you may have seen earlier on our blog, one of our weddings was featured as a “Real Wedding” in the latest issue of the Knot Michigan magazine which is currently on newsstands.  Cranbrook which is one of our favorite wedding venues in Michigan due to beautiful landscape and architecture had asked us a few months ago to use some of our photos that we had photographed there.  We didn’t know what they were going to use them for and just recently noticed that they used them for their latest full page magazine ad which is also in the Knot Magazine.  It’s always a rush  to see our pictures in magazines!!

Here’s a link for the high-res version that they sent me:
http://www.arisingimages.com/blog/images/2008-07/cranbrook_ad.pdf

This afternoon we went out and did an engagement shoot with Steve and Janelle. We shot Steve’s sisters wedding a couple of years ago and really hit it off with their family so we’re glad to be shooting another wedding in the family.
Here are a few favorites from today:

This weekend was one of our last weekends before our season starts to get silly busy!! We decided to pack up Mayz and head out to Grand Haven, MI. We found an amazing B&B right across from Grand Haven State Park which is rated as some of the best stretch of beach in the United States.
The three of us had a relaxing weekend filled with relaxation, nice walks, beautiful sunsets, and best of all…time together with no distractions!!

A link for a 2.5 min video clip from our weekend:

Here’s a couple shots of the Grand Haven Lighthouse:

This was one of my favorite shots from the trip:

Here’s a few of Mayz:

If you mess with him, he’s ready to punch you out!! (More accurately…he’s ready to play with sand and stare at his fist but…whatever!)

Here’s the view from the veranda at the B&B we stayed at:

Here’s a few photos of my favorite two people:

It’s nice carrying around my point and shoot camera now because I actually don’t mind handing it to someone else to take a group photo:

The B&B we stayed at was called The Looking Glass Inn. It sits on top of a hill across from the beach. The hospitality given by the owners (Norma and Howie) was phenomenal. We felt like we were staying with family. We just realized last week that we had no plans this weekend so Wednesday night we started calling around. We knew it would be tough to find a room. The Looking Glass happened to have a cancellation. We really felt like it was a gift from God because they usually are booked up months in advance and every room in town was booked due to the annual coast guard festival. For us to land a spot at one of the nicest locations in town was just a gift! Not only was the location perfect, but the room that opened up for us had an attached loft area where we could put Mayz’ pack and play so he had his own area that he could sleep in that was attached to our room but separate at the same time. It was unbelievable!!

Today we spent part of the afternoon walking around the beautiful city of Birmingham with Monique and Jim for their engagement pictures. We finished just in the nick of time as the rain came in!

Maurice and Nina had a beautiful wedding reception at the Royal Park Hotel tonight. They got married at St. George church in Troy and then we headed to downtown Rochester to do some fun pictures with them. Don and Joanne from Take One Productions were there to cover the video Here’s a link to their trailer:
http://take1productions.blogspot.com/2008/07/blog-post.html

Here’s a few of my favorite pics from today:

This afternoon we went to downtown Utica to shoot some fun photos with Caitlin.
Here are a few of our favorites:

We’re going to try something a bit new around here. To help promote photography and encourage amateur photographers, we are going to hold amateur photo contests on our site. We will pick a category and anyone that is interested in participating can email me a photo. A few of our favorite photos will get posted on our blog where you can have your friends and family come to our blog to vote for your photo.
We’re guessing that it will start out slow but hopefully in time, word will spread about our fun monthly contest and more and more amateur photographers will be interested in getting a bit of recognition for their work.
There is no prize other than a virtual pat on the back and having your photo displayed on our website.
So…let’s give it a shot.

Since this is our first try at this, let’s keep the category very wide. The first category will be water.
Please email me your favorite photos that involve water.
Photos should be submitted by amateurs only and the person submitting the images must have copyrights to the image.

Images should be in jpeg format and should be emailed to: .
In your email, please write:
Water Photo Contest in the subject line
In the body of the email, please include your name and the location the photo was taken.  Also write info about the photo and why you like it along with any other information you want to tell me about it.

Please submit your images by August 30th at which point we will announce a new contest and post some of the top images for review and voting.

Here are just a few images to help get the juices flowing:

Today was an interesting day. The plan was to have about 7 families with young kids to meet out at Metro Beach Metropark in Mt. Clemens to have an outdoor fun day. The weather was supposed to be partly cloudy up until around 2:00 at which point it was going to start getting ugly. We left the house around 10:45 am and it was pouring rain…REALLY REALLY hard rain! We had a back up plan, but most of the families bailed when the weather tanked. When we got to the beach, it was still raining. However, our friends the Carters and the Cesarios were still up for a fun day so we all went to CJ Barrymores in Mt. Clemens which has a whole lot of fun stuff to do. While it was raining, we stayed inside and played some video games with the kids and had some fun inside. Around noon, the weather cleared up at which point we went out on the bumper boats and had a blast with the kids. We had a squirt gun truce planned so I brought my new little camera to shoot some video of everyone on the bumper boats, but the squirt gun truce lasted all of about 4 seconds. When I tried to tuck my camera away, I jammed the lens and broke it…not a good idea to have it on the bumper boats anyway, I should have known better.
After a little climbing wall and bunjee bounce, it was around 2:00 at which point the weather was supposed to get really bad. But it never did so we went back to Metro Beach and the kids got to play at the Squirt Zone park which was a blast for them. All in all we had a really fun day today.
Next Saturday it’s back to work for us, so we tried to enjoy the weekend with friends while we had the chance!!

It was such a beautiful evening that we decided to head out for a dinner outdoors. I had to really twist Cheridy’s arm to get out of the house and not have to cook tonight…that took all of about 1 millisecond.
We went to one of my new favorite Asian food restaurants…Pei Wei. They had our food brought out to us faster than we could even get Mayz’ baby chair fixed to the side of the table.
Here’s our little dude. He’s armed with chopsticks and lots of chins and ready to conquer the big noodle bowl:

Congratulations to the Tabert family who are the winners of our 2008 family fun photo contest. They sent over a bunch of photos of the family all having a great time together but the one that really stood out was the one shown below. Kristen’s (mom) comment with that photo was “A family that pees together stays together” That made me laugh a LOT!!! It’s probably a good thing that Kristen was the one taking the photo and not with the rest of the family!!!
We’re looking forward to a fun photo shoot with the Tabert’s. Their prize is a free photo shoot with surprise gift from us along with 2 one our massages at Revitalize Day Spa in Birmingham. We’ll be sure to post a lot more photos once we’ve done the shoot.

Here is one of the images that Kristen sent in:

For the record, although we think this photo is hilarious, we don’t condone peeing outside which can lead to fines and other problems.