Well, this is more of a preview of an up and coming model I will be working with in the near future.

Got together with the lovely Hayley to talk about working together on some creative sessions. After the talk we shot off some Instax stuff for fun. With Hayley’s wonderful attitude and dance experience I am very excited to be working with her. Keep an eye out for some of that work here. The first session will be a senior type shoot, but I plan on pulling together something a little more out there to leverage her dancing skills….gonna be so much fun!

And if you want to see a few more from our walk, they are being post over on my Tumblr blog. I have been using that for more of my person fooling around

About a month ago I submitted Chantal and Josh’s engagement session to this great wedding blog Polka Dot Bride. The site is based out of Australia and is a gold mine of wedding ideas, awesome photography and inspiration.

I found out that Ms.Polka Dot like the session and today (well yesterday) it made it onto the Polka Dot Blog. Go check it out and share some love by leaving a comment….. Or don’t, but I’ll like you more if you do

There is one personality trait I have yet to figure out if it’s good or bad, I guess it all depends on who you ask, this little addiction of mine is I love to give.

Maybe it has something to do with my natural impatience, I don’t know, but if I buy someone a gift I can’t wait for what ever special occasion to hand it over. This trait shines when it comes to my sons. I love nothing more then finding that perfect gift, to pull it out and watch their eyes just light up with joy. This often leads to unplanned trips to Toy’R'us and that is what happened today.

I was heading to BestBuy to pick up some stuff and I brought Logan along for the ride. He was being so well behaved (an extreme rarity for him) that I thought we would jump over to Toy’R'us, he had been bugging us for a dinosaur he had seen on a YouTube video and I thought we may be able to find something similar.

We enter the store and start looking. Not finding anything of interest, I grab a salesman and ask him where I could find an animatronic dinosaur. He points us over to the Fisher Price aisle to check out the Kota & Pals series. When we rounded the corner my face dropped and I thought Logan was going to explode with excitement…Right there before us was a 2 foot T-Rex that roared, walked and a whole bunch of other stuff. I looked at it, then Logan’s face, then the price tag. I knew I was gonna have a fight on my hands.

I had to do some quick thinking to avoid a scene (read yelling, screaming, hitting, so on and so on). I grabbed the first small dino I could find and shoved it in front of Logan. It took a bit of talking, but I was able to get him to forget about the monster T-Rex and he walked out of the store with a new best friend.

That was at 11:30 this morning and since then he has done nothing but play with his new triceratops. When he is not playing with it, he is talking about it. I have heard “The triceratops has ‘free’ horns and a frill because T-Rex tries to bit him” more time then I can count this afternoon.

Yes the noise gets annoying and Nathan (my youngest) is terrified of it the poor little guy, but I think it’s worth it. I got to see that look of joy that every father just loves and my little addiction to giving has been satiated for a little while. Now if only Nathan was so easy to please. That boy is so hard to buy for…..

2010….sounds so sci-fi.

How will you remember 2009?

For my family 2009 was a year of firsts. First bike, first day at school, first hockey stick, first word (we think…). For the business, 2009 has been a year of maturity. It has also been my first full year with the blog. I have gotten to point my camera at some truly amazing people and I can say that I have the best clients on the face of the earth.

How will I remember 2009? With a huge grin on my face

I spent my new years long weekend combing through all the memories of 2009 and I’ve gathers 61 images that I think express the feeling of the last year of this decade for me. Lots of smiles, lots of emotion and a copious amount of lip locking. Some images you have seen, some never made it to the blog for one reason or another, but all would be lining my walls if I had a much bigger house.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I did capturing them.

Now….Bring on 2010!

Above image taken for Red Button Photography

One thing I find really annoying about being part-time in this photography thing is that the day job gets in the way of actually taking pictures. If you look all over the internet for advice on improving your photography, the number one response is shoot and shoot a lot…Well that’s kinda hard when you work 70 hours a week in another profession.

I have found ways to work around this problem though. One way is my 18 Wheels and a Camera project, this allows me to shoot and exercises the ol’ noggin in spotting those images even while I’m driving my rig down the 402 highway. Another way is my regular photo outings, today’s outing was kind of a road trip. I wasn’t sure where to go, so I put up a vote on Twitter asking for which direction to go…They said south, so I went south and ended up at Port Stanley.

I couldn’t believe the weather for a mid December day and it was quite nice out, the light was amazing. Anyways, here are some of my favorites from today….

As I was heading out of Port Stanley with the intention of swinging east and north to hit up some of the smaller towns past London, the clouds came rolling in and killed my light. I was totally bummed, I was having such a great time. I ended up just packing it in and heading home. As I was driving along I saw this last image. The mix of light, clouds and the framing of the trees just grabbed me and I slammed on the breaks. If the guy in the blue and white late model Ford Pickup up is reading this….Sorry dude! But I think it was totally worth it

It’s been a while since I have posted anything about my family, but after the news we just got I thought I would share a bit.

If you have been following this blog for a while, you will know that my youngest son Nathan has been diagnosed with PDD-NOS (pervasive development disorder-not otherwise specified). PDD-NOS falls under the autism spectrum. He is 3 years old, but at the level of a child half his age.

As it turns out, after a visit to a developmental pediatrician, our eldest son Logan may fall under the autism spectrum as well. We have been concerned with his social skills for a while, but having a diagnoses of autism was kinda hard to hear. You start to blame yourself and a feeling of failing your child does tend to happen. It is to early to tell anything yet with more tests to follow, so all we can do is wait.

All I can ask for as a father is to ensure my boys are happy, whether or not Logan turns out to have autism is a mute point. Of coarse I have moments where I feel like I have failed my boys, like I have neglected to protect them. Then I have to tell myself that I have done my job, Logan is a happy child and as long as I do everything in my power to keep him a happy child, I have not failed.

Be them doctors, lawyers or the guy behind the counter at the gas station… As long as my boys are happy I will be proud of them.

Cheers.