3/4 of a year gone already!

Just poppin' in to brag a little bit...

[sweetest 9.5 month old EVA.]

3 mos old!

Look at my big 3 month old!

special friends...

I recently did a photoshoot on the beach for some special, long-time friends and it was a lot of fun.  Everyone was a good sport for the most part and then we headed to Max's Pizza for some yummy dinner.

Here are some of my faves from the day:

Nimmo Family...

I had an opportunity to photograph a sweet family this past weekend, Caleb & Laura Nimmo and their two cute kiddos, Caden & Lilly. It's always a challenge to catch young, active kids in action but I'm pleased with what I ended up with from this shoot. It was a lot of fun to hang out with this family on the beach.

Here are a few of my faves:

class of 2010: revisited

I recently had the privilege to photograph the lovely Miss Caitlin Mason for her senior photos and had a really great time.  The Mason family attends Scotts Hill Baptist Church where I do, and Caitlin happens to be best friends with Jessica Warren, whose senior photos I had the privilege of taking last year, if you'll recall this post.

Caitlin and her mom did a lot of research before her photoshoot last week so they were prepared!  Caitlin is a fan of 'the gates' in downtown Wilmington so a lot of our shoot was spent walking/riding around downtown and stopping for photos here and there.  It was a beautiful day; perfect for strolling.

Of course, we hit the beach, too, because it IS just so close!  :)

I'm not quite finished editing the photos but here is a sneak peek at some of my faves from the day:

cora beth's first time at the beach: day 2

Here are photos from our 2nd day at the beach during my brother & his family's visit here last week. This time we got out to the beach about 3:30pm so we had a little more sunlight. Again, Cora Beth did great and was such a cutie! Her little bathing suit was just *too much* with her little hat! Daniel & Brandi brought her little swimming pool out and we blew it up and filled it with water for her so she play in it. She loved just getting in and getting out, getting in and getting out, getting all kinds of sand in it. It was so funny to watch her...

I had a hard time narrowing down which photos to post of her here -- some of these just came out so good...

a few more beach photos...

I just had to share a few more photos from my photoshoot on the beach a couple weeks ago. I've finished editing all of them and some of them came out really cool. Of course, I tried using some textures and color techniques....

I love how this came out! I probably shouldn't tell my secrets...this started out as a family photo of Catherine, Grace AND Rick, but I decided to see what I could do with just mom & daughter...

Sweet Gracers...

This is probably my favorite of the ones I edited. It happened quite by accident but I did take note of how I came to this result so that I can experiment with this technique in the future. It's pretty cool, huh?

class of 2010...

Alright, so most of you know how much I like taking photos, right? Well, this past Wednesday I had the awesome opportunity to make some money with it and take some photos of one lovely Jessica Warren. She's a senior in high school this year and her family asked me if I would take her senior pictures for them. Of course I said yes but I've been a little nervous about it. I mean, senior pictures is a BIG DEAL...

Well, we had lots of fun during the photoshoot and I seem to have gotten pretty lucky with some of my shots. :) Of course, Jess is a beautiful girl so I didn't have to work too hard to get some great shots of her. Take a look for yourself:

rivenbark wedding

Jeff and I went to a wedding last Saturday...the last one we'll go to for awhile, I guess. All the rest of our peeps are married. A couple in our Sunday School class at church, Adam & Whitney, got married and it was just lovely. We haven't known them that long but we've come to love them just the same. We're so glad we were able to be a part of their special day.

It was during their reception at the fabulous Hilton Riverside in downtown Wilmington that I learned something very important about my camera. Jeff actually mentioned it , and while it was something I'd read about in the manual when I first got my camera, I had forgotten about it. I have a button on the top of my camera that looks like a little flower and you want to use that feature when taking close-up shots of anything. Here's what happens when you take advantage of your camera's features:

Isn't that a really cool shot? It was really dim inside the reception hall so most of the photos I took didn't turn out that great because of that. But this one turned out pretty cool because I could use flash and that cool "flower feature". I love how the tag on the top of the box is really clear & crisp and everything from there out just sort of blurs out. Thanks, babe, for that.

Thought I'd throw this photo in, too, of me and Whitney. I did a little bit of color editing to this one. I played around with filters and blending options, too, but just didn't get any kind of effect that I really liked. We don't really need any editing, do we? :)

shower project x 2

Alright, as promised, I'm posting the invitation I designed for Elizabeth's shower this coming Saturday. The top of the invitation has an image that belongs to Elizabeth -- it's a paper project that one of her fellow bloggers created for her after Elizabeth sent her some homeade papers. Elizabeth is planning to use it in the baby's nursery somehow so I thought it would be special to use it on the invitation in some way, too.

Here's how it came out:

Save the date!

It is absolutely ridiculous how long I've been meaning to post this project. Way back at the beginning of March, I decided I wanted to throw my friend, Elizabeth, a baby shower and we set the date for a week from Saturday (May 16). So yes, as you can see the shower is nearly upon us...I should've written this post long ago.

Since we set the date out that far, I wanted to send a "save-the-date" postcard to increase our chances of having a good turnout for the shower. Elizabeth will be coming from Wake Forest, a good 2 to 2.5 hour trip, for the shower and I really want it to be worth her while to come. Also, I know how MY calendar fills up as we get into spring & summer and I wanted folks to have a heads up about the shower.

Elizabeth's fave color is red (and she does wonders with it!) and so she's incorporating that into the baby's nursery as well. From what I've seen on her blog, it is going to be a fantastic space, full of energy and fun. I can't wait to see the nursery finished!

I decided to go with that for the shower as well, and try to incorporate some of the elements she's going to use in the nursery. Here's what I came up with:

I have since mailed out the invitations so I'll be posting that in the next day or two (hold me to that, would ya? :) and you'll be able to see how I coordinated that. Had such fun designing both! I've been picking up items here and there this week for the shower -- I'm getting really excited!

new tricks...

A couple weekends ago, I took a trip to Lexington with my friend, Elizabeth, our end result being to go to Charlotte and walk through the new IKEA store there. We did that and had a great time, as I knew we would.

But you didn't think I'd come all that way and not see my niece, did you? No, I didn't think so. She was just over 8 months old then and learning new tricks! Wanna see?

The last time I saw her was at 6 1/2 months (you saw those photos in my last post) and she has changed so much just in that short time! Much more hair, standing/leaning against the couch by herself, and this! I don't know how but she's gotten cuter! I could just eat her up...

I'll leave you with this photo -- my fave at the moment. I love it when I capture exactly what I was going for! Her eyes actually came out red in the photo but I learned a really cool, really easy trick to take out redeye in Photoshop. Observe...

phancy photoshop...

I decided I wanted to experiment today with some of the photos I took on my trip to Lexington back in mid-February. I found some different images and incorporated some of my photos with them to produce some pretty cool-looking things (if I do say so myself!). These are some of my favorite photos of Cora Beth at 6 1/2 months old...

rare date night...

Jeff and I celebrated Valentine's Day a little later this year since we were apart on the actual day (I mentioned that in my last post). We normally don't really do much of anything to celebrate it however this year, Jeff sent this beautiful pot of tulips to me! Aren't they lovely?

I told Jeff that all I wanted was for us to go to the movies to celebrate Valentine's this year so we decided that Wednesday (yesterday) would be a good night to celebrate. I checked the movie schedule and the movie we wanted to see, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, was showing at 7:20pm. Jeff told me Tuesday night that dinner was part of my gift and that he was going to take me to the Bento Box! Oh.my.word. We've only been one other time but it was fantastic! Now, before that visit, I was not a big fan of sushi. Jeff was, but I wasn't real wild about it. The owner of the restaurant, Chef Lee Grossman, completely changed that! He took such good care of us that night and I thoroughly enjoyed myself (and the sushi!). We sat at the bar and watched Lee and the other guys create these beautiful, edible works of art.

So when Jeff said he wanted to take me there, I was stoked! I made a reservation for us at their new place (our first visit was on the last night they were to be operating out of their former location), at the bar again and we had just as good a time this time as we did the first time. Lee took care of us again and we tried some new things. But we loved everything! We had a Rainbow KC Roll, a bowl of calamari, a Sesame Shrimp Roll (something we had the first time) and a special they had going for Valentine's, a Lobster Roll. And for dessert? Oh, yes. We HAD to have dessert! :) We had belgian chocolate fondue with fresh fruit, homeade pound cake and macadamia nut cookies! Yum.ie. :)

I took a few photos of some of our dishes last night --

After dinner, we hopped across the street and went to the movie. It was so, so funny! Us and one other couple shared the whole theater -- it was really cool!

The night was so great. It was wonderful to hang out with my best friend -- eat good food, watch a good show. I love you, babe! Happy (belated) Valentine's Day!