Congratulations to his family on win! They will receive this image on an 11x14 canvas AND a $500 gift card good toward a Premium Session this year. 

But wait...there's more! We have two runners up who are each going to receive a $100 gift card:

Annnnnnd, the family of our grand prize winner selected THIS image as our 3rd Runner Up, also to receive a $100 gift card:

This family, near and dear to my heart, is no stranger to this blog. I have had the honor of photographing babies #2 and #3 as newborns with several wonderful family sessions woven throughout. This time, we wanted to do something different. Something more lifestyle. How are they when they're just hanging out together? What do they do as a family? It was such a fun afternoon, although I will admit that bouncing around on the trampoline made me the teensiest bit woosey ;-). This kind of love and connection cannot be forced. These kids could not be happier. Their mama could not be a better example of what a mommy/wife should be. Their dad could not be funnier.

Their holiday card proved to be quite a challenge for me, though. There were so many images we wanted to feature, but short of sending out a poster-sized card, we had to come up with some way to tell the story of their session. So, we ended up with this tri-fold:

I LOVED how it turned out. In fact, I decided to turn the JOY, HOPE, LOVE lines into a 12x12 storyboard AND it was used as the title page of their album:

Okay, I'm going to go a bit out of order here because I've been *dying* the share the images from my first newborn studio session! This was from the demonstration I did for the FIRST Pinkle Toes 4 Photographers workshop earlier this month. So much was going wrong for me that day (my mom/assistant was sick, my camera broke, the weather was yuck), but this little baby girl and her family were oh so right! After a bottle and a few minutes of rocking and shhhhhhing, she was putty in my hands.



Just look at that smile while looking up at her daddy! She seriously has me thinking I could start offering newborn sessions in studio....just maybe...

I cried the day I got the e-mail that her mommy and daddy were expecting. We had such a connection at our first session and I had always longed to see them again as parents. This little angel was so sweet and beautiful. And, she also let me work in her daddy's canoes (wasn't sure how I was going to pull that one off, LOL). I so look forward to watching her grow up!

This is what happens when you show up, hang out, and happen to take a few pics of a family being a family. Well...we did have some mosquitoes and a mishap with a set of stairs, but just look at their connection! Can't beat that!