My beautiful family

We tried to do our own family portraits this year. It was reasonably successful in that I was not present in most of the photos. This is always a good thing - my presence only serves to bring the overall attractiveness of a photo down.

However, my boys are handsome and my daughter is the cutest thing ever (not that I have any bias). I also feel that these photos show conclusively that Marci is a total hottie and that she somehow went mentally insane when she agreed to marry me, clearly to my advantage.

It was a fun evening, even it if is nearly impossible to get Gavin to relax and not give me the "fake smile" thing.

Seriously, how cute can you get?

Getting Gavin to relax when taking photographs is difficult. He just cannot grasp that being stiff and  posed doesn't look good. Tickling him helps.

Caleb gets it more or less - he's just too cool for school now. You have to get him to laugh to get really good pictures as well.

It is almost impossible to take a bad picture of Sabrina.

There are going to be some serious orthodontist expenses in the future.

Caleb is just a good kid. It's super easy to make him laugh too. In this case we had him say "Taylor Swift is a total hottie." Worked like a charm.

Honestly, she gets more beautiful every day. She is amazing.

Craig & Lisa Adams and crew

It was a month or so back, but, hey, nobody said that I keep my blogs up to date.

Anyway, this seems to be the year of the Mesa Arts Center. That is the location most requested and there were no fewer than 5 different groups taking photos at the center at the same time we were cruising around with the Adam's family.

Still, it was fun. It's always interesting to learn how to work with children. They are never the same and no matter how easy or difficult they may be, you still have to have patience and luck to get good portraits. I think we had sufficient of both for this shoot.

The lighting was perfect to be able to use a really cool yellow plastic wall that was back-lit by sunset, I thought it was awesome, and the effect of the back-light was really cool.

Unfortunately, the yellow color didn't match the decor that Lisa had in their house. She requested that I change the background to something more turquoise in nature. The change turned out pretty good, but I personally liked the yellow more - it was just fun.

This is probably my favorite picture from the day. We were having a lot of difficulty with getting Bryce to cooperate, but when we let him do his thing he did great. This picture shows that dynamic perfectly. Bryce is just back there jumping around....I think it's a fun picture.

This is another picture I liked. Bryce is now the only one that seems to be genuinely having fun. We just needed to find opportunities for the boys to be having fun together, then the pictures just took care of themselves.

Mesa Temple Christmas Lights Panorama

I had some fun shooting the Christmas lights at the Mesa Temple, and here is one of the resulting images. This is a large panorama of a little under 180 degrees. I shot it right at dusk so you can see a gradual lightening of the sky as you move from left to right.

I wasn't expecting it to turn out quite like this, but it still turned out pretty cool.

The original file is something like 57 inches across, so I've reduced to a lower resolution, but you'll probably still have to scroll a bit.

Enjoy.