Izzy

I cannot believe my "baby" is gonna be 18 next week. I just cannot get over that! He graduates this year.
He and I had a nice date lunch today and I just "happen" to take my camera with me. so on the way back we stopped at his old elementery school. Now that's way back. I took of few shots of him while it was snowing. Playing around with lighting. I loved the results. This is with my 50mm. Only wish I had my OCF with me at the time.

These are worth seeing in larger size (click on pictures) so you can see bokeh snow. I've never seen this.

Photography Goals or just goals in General

First of all Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. Have a safe and peaceful day to everyone.

I know a lot of you don't like setting "goals" for the New Year - I always have. Do I always keep them? No, but like a business plan it's a great navigation tool to guide you where you would "like" to go. Of coarse plans always change but "How will you know when you get there if you didn't have a plan?" And Like I always tell my kids, Time will pass whether you are working on your goals or not, so why not work on it?

I stumbled across this blog site today and I was inspired. Silber Studios
"Why set photography goals" is a must read for photographers they also have a ton of interviews from other photographers to learn from and inspire.

You may remember the book I made awhile ago. There sat this page, empty for a very long time. So after reading the Silber Studios post I decided to fill that page up and I did. Now I need to embellish more pages because I have a whole lot more writing to do.



these are the other pages that were in the book.

Christmas Cards

To say that I used to scrapbook would be an understatement. I have lots and lots of albums to prove that. However, two years ago when I picked up the Nikon, got a few lessons from David, joined a photographers forum and just got educated on photograhy my focus changed. Now most of my free time is spent on photography.
Sometimes I miss just playing with paper and inks. So I wanted to give my awesome co-workers an extra special Christmas card (Like I used to pre-photography) and I pulled out some supplies and whipped these up last night. I'm happy with them.
As with any of these post you can click on picture to view larger.

Sometimes you laugh - sometimes you cry

It's located in the art district in Boston Mass. The moody pop from CoffeeShop made the back appear like black velvet.

Thanks to the USO of Illinois

Thanks to the USO of Illinois and all of the volunteers who made this event possible.
The USO put together a very nice program for the families of soldiers. Isabella, her mom and I enjoyed the day at the beautiful Navy Pier (Chicago). There were so many great activities for Isabella to enjoy. We ran out of energy before we ran out of activities. They even fed us, twice. We had such a great day.

The only problem was that I forgot my camera. Yes I did! I ended up buying a disposable camera. Interesting. These are from that disposable camera. My daughter will probably fire me as a photographer LOL

The huge glasses are for the I-Max theatre, Snowman versus Santa. Very cute, loved the 3-D.

The decorations were wonderful!




Lots and lots of jumping possibilities

Globes

Chicago in Red and other strange finds

While looking through my pictures I noticed a lot of Red in the city -
The green lady is a picture of a bill board. I'm not sure what they were advertising but I thought it was interesting.