Recipe Fail

The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book.........and Martha Stewart’s demonstration.

And... I failed because I took some beautiful pictures of my stollen and then accidentally deleted them. Um, who does that!?

The stollen was interesting and pretty yummy considering I don't care much for dried fruit in bread. It had a warm cinnamon flavor with nuts and chocolate (an extra I decided to throw in for extra yumminess). I will make this short. Reading about food without any images is rather lame. January will bring a new baking challenge and photos which I promise not to delete. Happy New Year everyone!

An after Christmas family session

My first time shooting a large family group and I had such a great time! A wonderful family, gathered together for the Christmas holiday, enjoying one another's company and documenting this time in their lives through family photographs. I was warmly welcomed in, offered hot coffee, lent a screw driver for a camera piece and there was always someone concerned about whether I was warm enough. You would never guess by these pictures but temperatures were in the 30s with wind gusts up to 40mph. These guys were troopers!

There were so many pictures to choose from and with such a large number of family members I chose just a few of my favorites to share.










Thanks again for inviting me into your home to capture your time together! Happy New Year!

New little one...

A new little one was welcomed into the world recently. Such a sweet little girl. Loved the swaddle, the heat and being held by Mom and Dad. :)

Semper Fi

I spent an afternoon with my friend Koreana and her husband who is home from Marine boot camp in California. On opposite sides of the country for the last 3.5 months and with only two short phone calls time finally passed and they are back together! Yay! It was wonderful getting to know my Ben, a man I had heard so many good things about. I was honored to capture this moment between the two of them. Too many favorites to choose from, but choose I did. :) Welcome home Ben (for a little bit at least) and happy holidays to the both of you!

Love this one. You are so cute Koreana!

Another favorite. :)

Senior Picture time!-Arlington, VA

I love my job so it should come as no surprise that I had a fun time at my Saturday session with Bethany. Bethany is a Senior in high school, preparing to graduate in 2011 and she contacted me to do some senior portraits amongst the gorgeous fall leaves. I have only done a handful of Senior sessions but after Saturday vowed to do more. I had such a fun time with Bethany, discovering her plans for after high school, catching up on the latest Glee episodes and walking around the beautiful Glen Carlyn park as we snapped away. I had the hardest time selecting which images to put up on the blog because they all turned out so beautiful! Bethany, you rocked it.

Thanks so much for a fun session! You've inspired me to seek out more Senior students because of the fun we had. Good luck with applications and enjoy your sneak peek. :)

One of my favorites. Bethany wanted a few with the family dog Coco. :)

Fall family session - Capitol building

When I had emailed Megan about our session the other day, I told her she may need to bring gloves and a hat because... you know, November weather in DC...it might be chilly. I ate my words yesterday as we basked in the beautiful low 60 degree weather and shot amongst crunchy yellow and red leaves which seemed to glow in the sunlight. I think we commented 5 times at least on how lovely the weather was, how we couldn't have asked for a better day. Thanks for a wonderful session Matt and Megan! Here's your sneak peek. :)

Fall shoot with a soccer ball-

I headed to Maryland Saturday to meet up with these guys whom I met and photographed last year. It's always fun shooting repeat clients and these three rocked it. The morning had started out windy but by the time I made it up to their home the wind had died down and though a tad cool (50 degrees or so) it was a beautiful fall evening. Their little boy was such a trooper too. Mom mentioned as we were walking to the park that he had woken up in the middle of the night with a fever. But you never would have guessed by his behavior: one of my best child models by far. :)

I had been wanting to work pretty exclusively with a lens that gets ignored in my bag quite frequently and left my "go-to" lens at home to force myself to use this little used lens. And I am so happy with the results. I of course was a bit worried that perhaps the images wouldn't look right, that I would be nervous or uneasy shooting but it didn't happen. These three were fantastic models and great friends. They're even coming over for dinner next Sunday. How great is that!