New blog...

I decided to split my photography and personal blog posts up. If you are interested in keeping an eye on that one also...the addy is http://memoriesbylisa.blogspot.com Please click on the follow button to add it to your list.

A scrapbook page!!!

Well, I actually scrapped some today! I finished a page I started a couple of days ago. Also, thought I would share the page I made to use for my presentation a few days ago. Of course, I will still have to make a page two to go with this..

My Kylie girl...

Since I have been updating and editing some of my photos, I decided to go back and redo the ones of Kylie at the waterfall in 2007. I know they are older but I just love them!!! Here are a few for you to enjoy..if you want to see the rest they are on my website under the slide shows...


This one is one of my mom's favorites.


I love the reflection in this one.


I think this one is my very favorite one....

What have I been doing anyways?

Since I haven't been doing any scrap pages to share with you all, I thought I would share some of the photos I have been editing lately...and a picture of a beautiful young girl that I did a little work on for her mom. The others are all of my cousin Lindsey Myers family. If you have been to my website, you might have already seen these. If you haven't been there, then you haven't seen them!



Jace is just adorable and I ended but with some really cute ones of him!


I love, love, love this one of Madisson!


Casey and Lins make such a cute couple!


The happy little family!

See! I told you she was beautiful! Her mom (or dad) did a great job taking this picture! I am thrilled they let me work with it! Thanks mom and dad!

One thing I want to point out is, that when you click on these and they show up HUGE on your monitor..they are not designed to be view this large. Some the editing techniques tend to take on a cartoonish look in a large format. But they have the intended affect in the smaller print format. So these look more correct small here than they will bigger. Does that make sense?

Woohoo!

Well, I have some good news! I will give you a little back ground first...back when I decided to get a web address about 1 year ago, I did all the research. In trying to decide what name to use, I confirmed what ones were available. At the time, www.memoriesbylisa.com was available and of my options was my favorite at the end of the process. When I went to secure the address about 4 days later...it was gone! I was so mad. I felt like someone who worked at GoDaddy was monitoring the searches and then snapping up the ones that were searched so they could sell it to you for a profit! I had the whole conspiracy worked out in my head. And to make it worse..no one used it for anything!!!!

Well a few months ago I got an email from some random company telling me it had purchased www.memoriesbylisa.com and wanted to sell it to me for $99. For anyone who doesn't know, the cost of purchasing an open domain address has drastically reduced in recent years. So, needless to say, I didn't take them up on their offer.

In the process of transferring my existing domain to my new provider, it showed me the other available versions of my address and .com was listed. Some people like to purchase all the variations for several reasons. One is to make sure your clients find you no matter what ending they use and another is to make sure no one puts a bad site on something named so close to yours. My thought has always been that I would like to get .com some day if possible because .biz isn't very well known and it would be harder for people who knew my company name but not the web address to find me on the web at .biz. So it is only logical to try and get .com... but not at some pumped up outrageous price! So when I saw it on the list, I thought it can't hurt to check and see what I could get it for now.

I asked my new provider (which I love BTW) and within about 5 mins it was a done deal! It will cost me around $10 a year and my first payment won't be until October of 2010! Bonus! Now they will direct both addresses to the same site so no matter which ending you use, you still wind up at my site! So I don't have to reprint my cards or anything, I can just wait until I am ready for new ones and then change it to the .com. I want to use the .com as the primary one I give out since more people are familiar with it. It is slowly all coming together!

Bzzzzy, bzzzzzy, bzzzyyy

Busy...that is what I have been staying. I have really been working hard at making all the final adjustments and polishing touches on my website. I have more work to do though. I need to do more slide shows and I need add my price list. I have a price list that I use...I just need to get it posted. And decide if it is the pricing system I want to stick with.

Also, I have spoken with most of you, my friends and family about the use of your pictures as examples on my website. But if I failed to contact you and have any posted there that you would like removed, please let me know.

As you know, word of mouth is one of the most powerful forms of advertising. I need to add some additional family group sets, senior portraits and weddings to my portfolio. So if you know anyone with one of these needs, please send them my way!

I have corrected a lot of little things on my site, but if you happen across any typos, please let me know. Sometimes my eyes see what my head meant instead of what my hands typed! BTW, the web address is http://www.memoriesbylisa.biz for those of you who may not know it. Thanks for all your help!

Happy Monday!

Well, I hope everyone had a great Easter. As usual, we went to Ada for Easter. We spent a few nice hours visiting with Pop and Paulette on Saturday. Pop played the guitar for the kids and then we went for a walk in the woods to see where the boys deer hunt. They need to plan what they need to do this year to get ready and attract the big bucks to where they want them. Kylie wants to go hunting with them again this year. Guess I will have to start watching for camo her size. A not so cool part of living in and walking around in the woods in OK is tick season. I know we collected at least 5 (unwanted) ticks during our walk! yuck!

On Sunday we went to Mamaw's to spend the day with Mom's side of the family. This was a rare holiday where we had everyone there with the exception of the Pat's kids and their families (aka the California bunch). As much as we would all love to have them there with us, we have accepted that it probably just isn't going to happen. There were 41 of us there! Did you read that? FOURTY-ONE!!! Shannon and Lacee both had their new baby girls (Bella and Brighton) there and Tim came by with his (not as new) baby boy (Trenton). There were 17 great grandkids there. As usual, the kids had a blast racing around trying to the eggs first. I don't have too many pictures to load right now from Mamaw's. When I was uploading them to my computer..the photographer's most dreaded fear happened. My computer froze and I had to reboot! Some of my pictures were there, but most are just gone. And to make matters worse, the memory card is empty. Luckily, I had put them on the computer at Mom's before I left there, so she is sending me a disk with them on it. Thank you Lord!


This is me and Shannon's little angel, Brighton. She slept almost the ENTIRE time we were there. Wonder how the 6 hour drive back home went? All and all it was an awesome weekend. The only thing that would have made it better would be to have also been able to see Nana and Papa Eddie and Jim, Liz, Courtney and Mary also.

A little more progress...

I managed to finish a flier today to pass out about my photography biz. I designed it to go with the cards. I have also decided on my logo for now and I posted it also to share you. Things are moving along with the business.

Tomorrow (or rather tonight now), I am the presenter at the North Texas Digital Photography club monthly meeting. I will be discussing mostly digital scrapbooking, but will also cover some of the other applications that Photoshop Elements can be used for other than just photo editing...for example, business cards and fliers! If this goes well, then there maybe be some upcoming classes that I will offer to begineer users for digital scrapbooking. While the things you can do in PSE seem to be endless, it is not very user friendly for scrapping at first. You really need someone to guide you at least at first. I had been using it for over a year for photo editing and could not for the life of me figure out how to get started with digiscrapping! I have lots of last minute details to pull together tomorrow (or rather today now) to get ready and I think my fliers are done printing so I guess I will get ready for bed now! Nite !!

Making progress...

Well I picked up my business cards today and they turned out really good! I also took some pictures of Cameron yesterday and got a chance to edit them today. I am trying out different techniques and I actually like most of them. They are different and cool in their own way.



This is the original picture.

This is a colorized center fade.

This is all manual editing.

MIA...

Well, I have a decent excuse for being MIA. I have been working on editing more of my picture to add to a website I am building. It still isn't finished, but it is closer. My main hang up I think is the text. I will have to focus on it more in the next couple of days to get it finished. This picture of Josh is one I edited with an action is PSE. I think it turned out pretty cool.

I also designed and ordered my business cards today. They should be ready tomorrow. I am pleased with how they look.

Have you noticed..

That lately I seem to post in spurts? Well, I finally made myself do a layout last night to try and catch up on some of my project 365 pages. I think this one turned out pretty good.

Just a bit of a catch up on Josh. Within a few days of getting the wrist cast he mentioned that now his wrist was popping more in the cast than it had out of it. So I called the Dr. just to see what they said about it. I didn't hear from them for a couple of days. I felt this meant that they didn't see this as a problem. Then I got call that they wanted Josh to come in that afternoon to have the cast removed and receive an injection in the area. I have to say that Josh was quite excited. Even though the cast had only been on a few days, he was extremely thrilled at the thought of it coming off! So much so that at first he didn't hear the part about the injection. So the excitement was followed by "Did you say an injection?" "Ugh!!""

Even so, he held on to the cast coming off part with an abundance of hope that he would be leaving the office in a brace this time. Well, long story short and 1 injection later...we left the office with Josh in a full cast that goes up above his elbow! He was not a happy camper.. So now each and every evening Roger and I get to listen to Josh reason as to why we should let him cut it off. The boy is driving me crazy!! And lately, that is a dang short drive!

Shouldn't I be asleep right now?

The answer would be yes. But alas...I am not. It seems that since spring break and daylight savings time...my sleep schedule is all out of whack. I get sleepy about 2am and then get up at 6am to get the kids ready and off to school. And then do it all over again...ugh!