Meet Cooper. Such a sweet and cuddly little puppy dog!!

Consider yourself warned.

Yep, you better beware. This guy will steal your food and lick you to death if you’re not careful …

We met each other in middle school (I won’t mention how many years ago that was!) and spent a good portion of those formative years writing notes back and forth to one another. From the mundane (what was for lunch) to the critically important (which boy was the cutest), the content of our notes varied widely. What never wavered, however, was our friendship. (Ha! Who am I kidding? This is middle school we’re talkin’ about here … I’m sure there were probably one or two fights along the way. LOL) In all seriousness, though, I’m so happy that Jen and I have remained friends over the years and that we’ve actually been able to reconnect and see each other in person a few times since my move to Southern California. And while we may no longer scribble notes to each other on college ruled paper from our 3-ring binders, we do find each other leaving notes for each on our Facebook walls now. My, how we’ve grown up …

Last week, we met up for a quickie session with Edgar, her adorable little pug.

I’ll leave you with this photo I love. Looks like they are both smiling!

JF, your gallery’s ready. I’ll email you the 411 shortly.

Had a fun little session on Friday afternoon. No time to properly blog the session tonight and I’m out all day tomorrow (picking oranges with the family at Erich’s grandmother’s orange grove) but I just had to throw at least one photo up on the blog.

This guy will do anything for food.

Back in a few days with a real post! Perhaps with a mimosa in hand …

I am incredibly blessed to find myself in a profession whereby all of my clients (so far) have become friends and many of my friends have become clients. Both circumstances are fantastic for me but I have to say, the pressure is totally on with the latter. Don’t get me wrong. I get nervous before all of my sessions and I always, always, always strive to to hit the ball out of the park. But when my friends come to me and trust me with their precious time, I feel an extra level of pressure to perform above and beyond. To give them more than they expect. So, here I am … nervous and hopeful that my first set of Bay Area friends/clients (fri-ents?) are happy with the time they spent in front of my camera.

K&M, I was so incredibly excited to take your family’s photos this year. You both have such infectious smiles that were clearly passed down to your sweet (very sweet!) girls. I knew it would be a lot of fun photographing all of you. Thank you so much for motivating for an early morning session, squeezing it in before a very full day of tailgating and football fun. I really enjoyed the time we spent catching up. Now we just have to work on the frequency of our visits. Our bi-annual visit to Menlo Park for the Stanford/UCLA football game just isn’t gonna cut it. We need to see more of you! Promise you’ll visit us soon. Maybe I’ll keep your photos hostage until you promise to set a date to visit …

Here are a few highlights from your session. Thanks for being patient while I finished up the Bay Area tour!

Clearly, these girls love their Daddy:

No shortage of love for Mommy either:

Look at these eyelashes. Seriously. Those lashes are TDF (“to die for” for those of you not up to speed with internet/texting lingo)!!

Sisterly love:

And this little one’s so adorable in braids. Daddy wanted her hair down for family photos … but after Daddy left (for the game), we put her hair in braids and captured her in her ‘everyday’ hairstyle!!

And the grand finale …. K&S with Ginger!! Poor Ginger had a broken paw and was hobbling around with a cone and cast during our visit. Somehow, we still managed to get a cute shot of the girls with their pup! I’m so glad we rallied to get this shot.

Hope you liked your first look at photos!

The title of a cute new children’s book?

The name of a spooky Halloween movie for kids?

Nooooooope. Smokey, Little Man and Boo are the names of three beautiful dogs I recently met and photographed. While vacationing in Seattle, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with some great college friends. A couple of friends whom I cherish and love dearly but hadn’t seen in many, many years. One of these friends (the owner of these dogs you’re about to see) lives in Bellevue and the other — author of The In Between Hop, a baseball inspired blog — happened to be in town for the last stop in his eight (or nine?) game baseball roadie. What great timing for a mini reunion.

In between much laughter and shared memories of crazy antics at our alma mater, I snapped several photos of these furry friends.

Smokey:
Isn’t he awesome? Did you notice his eyes? One brown, one blue.

Little Man:
What a little cutie!

And Boo:

And since I couldn’t decide which image to blog (he was such a good poser for me!), here’s another:

G&JJ: It was such a treat to see you guys twice in one week. Let’s try to keep the visits more frequent. I’ve already told Erich about plans for Vegas next year.

In yesterday’s post, I wrote about how challenged I felt photographing a family with four children. Well, as of this morning, that challenge already seems like old news to some degree. A few hours ago I had a little photo shoot with this playful guy … and we had to work reeeeeaally hard to get that sucker to stay still. I’m happy to report that while the split seconds of calm and stillness were definitely few and far betwen, we were able to document the ones that Duke gave us.

B, enjoy your pics of your handsome pup.

H, check out your little baby. He’s definitely very deserving of some prime wall real estate, if you ask me.