Another Update

I finished the Durrant Family pictures last week and I finished the Buchanan family pictures yesterday. This week I will be doing the Lawson family pictures. With Christmas being this week, they are probably the only family I will be working on for the week. After the Lawsons, there are 2 more families (the Alders and then the Guerneys). The Alders should definitely be done before the 1st of the year. I would like to try to have the Guerney's close to finished (if not finished) by then as well. However, if the Guerney's pictures do not get done by the 1st, they should be done within a few days after. I will keep you updated if there are any changes to this.

Merry Christmas! :)

Update

Just thought I'd give everybody another update . . .
I did not reach all of my goals that I set for last week. :( I finished the Dowell kids photos and I now have all of the previews up to this point up on the blog, but I did not get a chance to finish the Durrant Family pictures like I had hoped (sorry!).
So - goals for this week:
-finish the Durrant family pictures
-start working on the Buchanan family pictures. I would like to finish these pictures this week as well, but I don't want to say they will be finished and then have it happen that they don't get done. So for now plan on the Buchanan family pics being finished by the beginning of next week and if they get done sooner (which I hope to be able to do) then all the better. :)

Also, I'm changing the process of when I do previews for all sessions done from this point on. From now on I will post your family preview on the blog when it is time to edit all of your family pictures. So when you see your family preview on the blog, you'll know that I'm working on your pics and you should expect to receive your edited CD soon after (in most cases - within a week).

For 2010 I will only be booking 1-2 sessions a week (once I am able to speed up the editing process I will book more than 1-2 sessions on SOME weeks). Just a little info about me that may help you to better understand why I don't want book more sessions than that (you can skip this part if you're not really interested, lol.). . .
#1 reason - I'm doing photography for the fun of it! I'm a stay home mom to 2 kids and I love it! I started getting more into photography recently (in June of this year) and really found it an enjoyable hobby - something that I could get out of the house and go do and get a break from the kids and have fun. Until my kids have out grown me and don't want me around anymore - I have no intentions of making this a full time job. Another thing about me - I LOVE TO LEARN! I want to learn everything I possibly can about photography whether that be through reading books, hands on experience, photography courses, or whatever. Learning new things and trying out the things I learn is what keeps me going. I need to allow myself plenty of time #1 for my family and #2 to keep learning. I don't want to feel like I'm just out snapping the same pictures and doing the same things over and over again - and I don't think that any of you want me to be doing that either. That would get boring and I don't think I would want to do this anymore if that's all that this became. Which is why I need to allow myself enough time in my schedule to learn new things.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may cause to any of you when it comes to scheduling.

Just FYI - I am currently booked to the end of January. I don't know how popular February will be for family pictures, but if any of you (or any of your friends or family members who are interested) would like to schedule a session to do spring pictures you may want to book soon to make sure that you get a session at the time that you would like it. The pricing list for all the different types of sessions is on the website - audreyphotographyonline.com. Whatever price is on the website at the time that you book I make note of it on my schedule next to your name. So even if your session isn't scheduled until July, the price at the time of when you called and booked your session will be honored (just thought I would clear that up, some people had questions about that when my pricing recently changed).

Thank you to all of you! You have all been so kind and so patient through all of the bumps I have hit that have made things take longer than they should. I have really enjoyed meeting ALL of you and I hope to see you all for pictures again in the near future.

I will continue to give weekly updates to let you know when your pictures will be done until I have all of your pictures finished. I hope you all have a great Christmas!

The Gurney Family Preview

This family was so much fun! Mom and Dad are the cutest, sweetest couple. I wish I could have seen what mom was doing behind the camera to make the kids smile - whatever it was, it was making Dad laugh pretty good. Here's the Gurney family preview . . .

The Alder Family Preview

This family was so much fun to do pictures with! They were all so friendly it hardly felt like it was the first time we had met (which was great for my nerves). Meeting new people is so out of my comfort zone - and it's now something that I'm doing all of the time with photography - which is a GREAT thing. I'm working on trying to be a more extroverted person and it helps me a lot when the people I work with are happy to be there and friendly (which all of my clients so far have been - you guys are awesome!). I try to do things in the car on my way there to calm the nerves like listening to music, praying, and taking deep breaths in and out. There have been times when I'm in the process of doing this and my husband has called - I answer and say "sorry, can't talk - I'll call you when I'm done taking pictures, I need to concentrate right now". Haha, I'm so lame. ;)
Here's the Alder family preview . . . :)

Kayley's Maternity Preview

This is my beautiful sister in law Kayley, her husband (Casey), and her baby bump (Brinley). She is due at the beginning of January. While we were all in Arizona for Thanksgiving I took these pictures in one of the rooms of my brother and sister in laws house. She's the cutest, tiniest, pregnant lady ever!

The Lawson Family Preview

I reached all of my goals for last week! Yay! (minus posting this preview on Saturday, but I did finish editing these pictures last week - so I'm still counting it as reaching my goal) :)
Here are my goals for this week:
-Do previews from sessions that were taken with my new camera
-Finish the Dowell kids pictures
-Finish the Durrant family pictures

Here's the Lawson family preview! Their son loved to get his picture taken. The picture I chose of him to use for this preview is one of my very favorites - it makes me smile every time I look at it.

More Buchanan Family Preview

Here's the rest of the Buchanan Family Preview! I love the dress that Monica (the mom) chose to wear. And the boots that Monica and her daughter were wearing were so fun for pictures!

Send Me Your Email Address (If you'd like)

Here's a little update of what's going on right now . . .
I came across some obstacles that slowed me down in getting editing done . . .

-My website took a lot more time out of my days than I had originally planned on (which meant less time to edit).

-We were out of town last week for Thanksgiving and unfortunately my computer is a desktop, not a laptop, so our total of about 26 hours of driving couldn't be spent editing (although I did get to read a photography book that I had been wanting to read for a while, and I got the chance to transfer my schedule into my new planner - up until then I had been using free printable calendars off of the internet and there were notes all over the pages and post-its stuck everywhere - so now I feel much more organized and hopefully I won't feel so scatter brained anymore, lol).

-I got a new camera!! Which is awesome! Although it brought with it another thing to slow me down, that I hadn't planned on. Currently when I take pics (I take them in RAW) I first load them onto a program called bridge and then I use the camera RAW program to do some adjustments and then I turn it into a jpeg and finish it in photoshop. I had planned on switching to a program called viewnx (instead of bridge) as soon as I had the time to sit down and learn how it works. Well, when I shoot in RAW on my new camera and I try to load it on to bridge, it doesn't work for some reason. I can only bring up RAW images in the viewnx program when they are taken on my new camera - so I need to learn my way around the program before I can edit those pics (which shouldn't take too long - but is definitely going to take time away from editing).

So . . . my goals for the rest of this week are:
-Finish The Larson Family pictures
-Learn my way around the new program (viewnx)
-Get as many previews up on the blog as I can (I will have 5 previews that need to be put up by the end of this week) . . . to learn why previews are one of my priorities please keep reading :)

I'm SO SORRY for the delays. GOOD NEWS - I blocked out my schedule (as far as scheduling new photo shoots goes) for the rest of this month, so I could catch up on all the editing.

The reason I'm making blog previews a priority is so that if any of you would like pictures for Christmas cards, I can email you the same pictures that are on the blog (which generally is 1 family picture, 1 couples picture, and 1 picture of each of your kids)- then you can have pictures in time for your Christmas cards. If you would like me to email some pictures to you please email me at audgeag@hotmail.com and let me know your name and email address or you can call me at 801-717-8353 to give me your email address (If you email me, I will respond to let you know I received your email - if I don't respond, then please call me).

Again . . . I'm really sorry for the delays, but thank you for your understanding and patience while I work out all the kinks!

My Website is Up!

Getting my website up and running was much harder than I originally thought it would be. But it's up now - YAY!! It's not designed quite the way I would like it to be, but I will deal with those issues later. Here's the site . . .
http://www.audreyphotographyonline.com
Please note: My pricing has changed and is reflected on the pricing page on the website. Any bookings from now on will be priced according to what the website pricing page reflects (prices on website at time of booking will be honored).

The Buchanan Family Preview

Sorry! This is a very short post. With packing for our trip I did not get all the editing done that I had hoped. :( Here's one picture for now . . .

Mini Session with My Mom

This is my mom! We had some fun doing a little mini session about a week ago. She is soooooo beautiful!! Here are a couple of my favorites. Another favorite of mine was a picture of her laughing - I showed it to her on the LCD screen on my camera right after it was taken and she didn't seem to like it so much. I won't post it on the blog, just so I don't receive any harassing phone calls from her cursing at me (just kidding, she wouldn't do that). Here's my wonderful, beautiful, loving, kind, sweet, fun mother.

The Durrant Family Preview

It's taken a lot longer than I had hoped to get this preview up. Sorry! I'm trying to catch up.

We're leaving on vacation, so I'm going to try and get the other 3 previews up that I need to do before we leave tomorrow. Wish me luck!

These pictures were taken last Tuesday. It was a lot warmer than planned on (which was great) and this family was so much fun to spend time with. The kids had lots of fun feeding the ducks and playing in the leaves and I think we captured some good pictures of them just having fun. Here's a little preview.

The Dowell Kids Preview

I had tons of fun doing this session!! It was my birthday and my husband took the day off of work, so he was with me at the photo shoot. It was great! Too bad that can't happen all the time, I think we made a pretty good little team. ;) These kids were so fun and adorable to work with! Here's a little preview.

More for Mindi :)

Here is some more pics for the Barker family preview!
And about that funny story . . .

So, the place we took pictures at was an old farm. Farms smell like cow pies, it's just a fact of life. I saw an old rusty looking trailer thing and thought it looked like it would be cool for some pictures, so I walked over and checked to make sure there wasn't anything inside. It looked like it had hauled some "dirt", but it looked like it had been swept out pretty good. So I tried to get some of the kids to come over for a picture and only one of the kids was willing to get in, and a couple of the others kept telling their mom that it smelled really bad. I don't know if it's cause I was recently sick, or what, but the whole place smelled faintly of cow pies and it didn't smell any different to me over there. So I didn't think anything of it, and we went on taking pictures. As we went to leave, we walked past one of the farmers on our way out and he had this huge grin on his face. He stops and talks to me and Mindi and says, "ya know, you're the first photographer we've had who wanted to take pictures of the manuer truck", and then he kind of laughed. I was so embarrassed! But we all got a good laugh out of it. I learn something new, or a better way of doing things, or I get new ideas and such every time I take pictures. The biggest thing I walked a way with on this occasion . . . I learned what a manuer truck looks like and NEVER to take pictures next to one again! haha.

Just a little clarification . . .

So I was having a conversation with my sister in law today and it made me think I should explain a couple of things so there isn't any confusion . . .

I will always post a preview from your photo shoot hopefully the night of the shoot, but if not, it should be up within a few days. How many pics I post, really depends on how much time I have at that moment - but generally I like to post one family picture, one picture of mom and dad, and one picture of each of the kids.

I edit pictures in the order they were taken, with the exception of the previews. After I post a preview of your family, I then go back and work on the the family that had their pictures taken first and then work my way down.

Once I've finished editing all of the photos from your photo shoot, I like to post more of my favorite pictures on the blog in a new post.

My biggest priority (as far as your pictures go) is getting your pictures edited and back to you. So, if I ever start to feel like I'm getting more behind on editing than I would like to be, the blog will have to be put on the back burner until I catch up. I may not always be able to do all of the posts and all of the pictures on the blog that I would like to, but I promise that as long as there is time I will keep up on the blog as planned.

The other thing I felt I should clarify . . .
Blogger should be the 8th wonder of the world!! Sometimes when I load up the pictures they have their full color like they do when I'm done with them in photoshop and then other times I load them up and the color looks much duller. And even though I shrink them all to the same size to be loaded on blogger, if I click on some, it blows them up way bigger than they should be and it makes the picture look like it's low quality, but then other times it does just fine.

Why does it do this?? I'm really sorry, but I have NO CLUE! Which is why I think it should be the 8th wonder of the world. But your pictures will look great on the cd I give you, so no worries! :)

The Larson Family Preview

This is my friend Tami's brother's family . . . bet ya can't say that ten times, fast. haha ;) Here is a little sneak peek at some of their pictures I took today.

P.S. in case all you out there who check out my blog were wondering . . YES! I LoVe COLOR! :) Sometimes I'll come across some pictures that I look at and think - hmmm this one would do good in black and white, or sepia, or whatever. But for the most part, I think most of my pictures look best in color. It's just my personal preference. Hope you like!