Yesterday we had an awesome photo shoot with Sarah. She’s a dancer so we tried to come up with some non-traditional dance photos as part of her senior pics. There are a lot of really cool ones…here’s just a few of my favorites from her shoot.

Tonight Jeff and Erin were married. They were very natural and comfortable together which made them really easy to photograph. Combining that with nice weather and great light, it made our jobs easy! They were married at St. Anastasia which is the church where they both grew up. We went for photos at the Troy Historical Museum and then there reception was at Petruzzellos in Troy, MI.

Last week we had the chance to get together with our good friends from mod4 to do family photos. They have a really cool studio setup in an industrial loft in Detroit where there is plenty of space to play and have fun! Thanks Jes and Nate!!

This afternoon we visited with the Stark family. Seth is a friend of mine from church. A few months ago their world turned upside down when they found out their 5 year old daughter Eve has leukemia. For the last three months, they’ve been in and out of the hospital for treatments that most of us will hopefully never know anything about. However, during these trials and tribulations, they’ve been able to stay positive and watch God work in their lives. Their strength comes only from Him and it was a real pleasure to spend some time with their family and watch them play with each other and just love each other.
You can read about Eve’s story and progress on the blog they made for her at EveStark.com

To keep things interesting, we like to wear a multiple hats. Yesterdays hat was to be commercial photographers. Last night we had a unique photo shoot. We were hired by a company called Digital Praise to photograph a product of theirs called Dance Praise which combines high energy contemporary Christian music with a dance arcade style game. Rather than setting up a commercial type atmosphere with a controlled environment, they were specifically looking for photos of an actual setup at a church. Grace Christian Church which has a brand new huge building at 14 Mile and VanDyke in Sterling Heights, MI has an AMAZING facility for kids. They have a wing called KidNation which was specifically designed and built for young kids where they have their own space to kick back, have fun, and learn about God. It’s a really great setup. We got to work with Pastor Josh and his wife Kate who were very helpful and accommodating. To learn more about KidNation, you can check out their website at: http://www.kidnation.org
Or to learn more about Dance Praise, you can go to the Digital Praise website: http://www.digitalpraise.com/

Here’s a few pics of the Digital Praise setup at KidNation:

We just recently got ourselves a point and shoot camera. It’s the first time we’ve ever had a point and shoot that doesn’t suck. It’s a Canon SD870 IS and I almost like it equally for video and photo. We so rarely have pictures of ourselves because we just didn’t like having to carry around our large professional cameras. Now we can stick this little camera in our pocket and bring it everywhere so hopefully you guys don’t all get sick of me posting more personal stuff on our blog.
We had a great meeting with a potential new clients this morning and then took the rest of the day off to enjoy the beautiful day. We took Mayz back to Metro Beach and went for a nice walk and then found a place to sit down and hang out for a while.
We played around with Mayz until he was all tuckered out and ready to crash!

I’ve been playing with a new wordpress plugin to make a little header slideshow for our blog. If you haven’t seen it, just look at the top of our blog and let me know what you think.

Last night I spent some time putting together a really cool art piece for Mark and Christina and wanted to post it here. We call this product the Pirlo.

Since Mayz was born last November, we’ve been shooting a series of video and still shots and I thought it would be a fun project to put everything together.
When he was first born, we didn’t have a video camera, so that’s mostly stills, but after that it’s all intermixed.
This was my first real video editing project. I don’t really know much about video editing and I have very simple software (Adobe Premiere Elements 4), but I think it turned out pretty good and it’s something we’ll be able to watch for the rest of our lives. Watching these clips is a reminder of just how blessed we truly are.

I wanted to post it so anyone else interested in seeing it can watch it. However, YouTube has a 10 minute max video length and this is 12 minutes so I had to cut it into two pieces. Part 1 and 2 are shown below.

Part 1 (8 min)

Part 2 (4 mins)

Last night we had dinner with our friends Keesha and Bobby. They grilled up some yummy barbeque, we had good conversation, and we also had fun with our little Mayzee Bear. Here’s a quick clip of Cheridy tickling his cute little butt.

Yesterday we went with Mark and Christina to the beautiful grounds of Cranbrook school in West Bloomfield, MI to do their engagement shoot.  Cranbrook charges to use their grounds for photo shoots, but it’s totally worth for the beautiful scenery and architecture.  Mark and Christina are a super fun couple who just loved to laugh together!

Today we had a kick butt high school senior pic shoot with Andrea. She’s an awesome drummer so we had her come over and set up her drums and we fired up the old fog machine (which isn’t quite so old…bought it last night).
We got some awesome pictures of her on the drums along with some really cool pics we did with her outdoors.