OneWed Vendor of the Year!

Thanks to the wonderful couples I worked with last year, I am so excited to share with you that OneWed has named Jenifer Lyn Photography one of their Best Wedding Vendors of 2008!!!! Click here to view the story behind the list and to download the full PDF list to view.

It is such an honor for me! Thank you to all the couples I worked with in 2008 - you are all very special to me.

New Canon!

I've been wanting a point and shoot camera for a while now. I seem to find myself at different occasions wanting my camera, but not wanting to bring my whole DSLR kit everywhere. For example, we are leaving for Disney in 55 days (or so I've been told!) and I really want to be able to get some images of the kids at the parks, but I REALLY don't want to have all my gear with me.

So I think I finally have the answer! Today we bought a Canon Powershot Digital Elph. This thing is soooooo cute. And at 7.1 megapixels, it's got some good-sized files. Plus, it fits in my pocket!!!!

We just bought it today, so I haven't had too much time to play with it, but it seems pretty good. It can actually capture these cute little videos, too. I mean, I can't compete with MGM or anything, but I can capture videos and share them with family who can't see the kids everyday.

I took the following image with it set on fully automatic. I take this time to also introduce our new living room set up....we moved the couches and added in a huge white bookcase. I love it!!
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Notice RJ hamming it up for the new camera?!

The auto flash went off - I'm not crazy about that, but I'll read the manual and figure out how to get a little more control over it.

Now, I'm not sure if this will work, but I'm going to try to post a 12 second video of the kids fooling around for the camera. They are sooo cute!

We have our first little league baseball practice tomorrow (weather permitting), so I think I'll bring it with me and test it out some more.

Until then, have a great night!

Portsmouth Fun!

Portsmouth, NH is just a wonderful place! It's so cute! We arrived at Sheraton Harborside on Friday around 3, checked in, and took a tour of the hotel to get an idea of where everything was going to take place on Saturday.

While in our travels we were fortunate to run into Lee, the Catering Manager for the event. She is wonderful! She took the time to show us around and give us the timeline of the events and show us the different places where everything was taking place. I honestly can't say enough good things about her - she's so sweet!!

By this time it was dinner time, so we found our way over to Cafe Mirabelle - a quaint French restaurant. Since it had snowed earlier that day and it was still extremely cold out, the restaurant was very empty. So we were able to get a seat in the upper level window, overlooking Portsmouth. It was wonderful! The food was fantastic and the staff was great. I was so glad Ron took the time to research area restaurants and found this, or we never would have had the chance to try it out. We will definitely go back!

We went back to the hotel and had a couple drinks in the lounge - it was nice. Of course, I had my camera with me and played around with a few things. Here are a couple, starting with Ron on the phone (behind my very tasty martini):


With this next one, I was trying for long exposure out the window to capture the lights and boats in the water outside the hotel. It came out kind of cool....

The wedding coverage didn't start until 3 on Saturday, so we got up early, ate breakfast at the hotel and took a walk around the area. When we came around the corner, we found this great church:

This image is actually a composite of two images I took. When we went out, I had only brought my 50mm lens and it was not wide enough to get the whole church, even from across the street. Adobe's CS3 does a great job pulling the images together - it's really cool!

Then we turned to our right and saw this scene down the street - it's just sooooo New England-y isn't it?!

As you look closer at the image, though, this pink sign stuck out like a sore thumb from behind the flag pole!!! Notice anything interesting?! My maiden name is Gregoire (which isn't extremely common) so it was really cool to see!!

As you can see from the outfits of the people on the street, it was FREEZING cold out, with a wind chill that I swear felt like 12 degrees. So we didn't spend too much time outside! We grabbed a bite to eat at the Portsmouth Brewery. Since we were working, we didn't have a beer, but they had like 20 of them on the blackboard. The food was really good.

Well, that's about it, leading up to the wedding. I will blog with images from the wedding in the next day or two once I've had a chance to go through them all. I will say, it was a great wedding and I am so glad Christy and Jim chose us to share their day with them and their family/friends.

More to come soon!

Spring has SPRUNG!!!

And it's about time. I know I shouldn't complain, since we really didn't get that much snow this winter, but it has been the loooooooooooooooooooooongest winter ever. I mean, it's almost May and this is the first day we've seen 60 degrees. I am very happy, though, it is supposed to be nice and warm all weekend.

Here's the kids drawing on the driveway with sidewalk chalk.

So I took full advantage of the B-E-A-U-tiful (Jim Carrey reference, Mom) day and planted some nice spring flowers. I got some mini daffodils and a few other things that I don't know what they are called. I got them because they are NOT brown, white, or almost-green like the rest of the yard right now. I want color!!!!!!!! Anyway, here's a couple of images of the pretty, colorful flowers that I got.

Doing Dishes

Something I've seemed to have forgotten to do in this craziness of life, is to capture more images of the kids just being kids. I've spent time in the past trying to get the perfect posed image of my children for Christmas, or Easter, or just because. What I seem to forget to do is take the camera out while they are doing what they do best - playing, having fun, etc. In my opinion, a posed picture is nice, but rarely captures the true essence of the child. And since the purpose of taking pictures is to forever capture your children in time - why not do so while they are doing all the things that they love?

When I look back at pictures of my children in a year, two years, or even ten years from now, will I remember that RJ's favorite toy is his Lego Star Wars? Will I remember all the times Maddy sat down to color on whatever she felt like coloring that day? I hope so, but my guess is that I won't. And having great images of them doing their favorite things will help. So, I'm making a pact to myself to take the camera out more during daily life and get them doing things that they usually do.

Tonight I did that, in a rare moment where my children (of their own accord, mind you) decided to wash the night's dishes for me. Aren't they sweet? Being 3 and 6, though, they didn't really clean anything, but they sure got water everywhere!

New 50mm Lens

I just got a new 50mm lens and I've been dying to test it out! I love it. It's small, compact, clear, and super fast - way faster than anything I've ever owned. I'm hooked! I took it with me to the playground and got a few really cute images of the kids. Take a look!




I LOVE how you can see each strand of Maddy's crazy hair. I think this image describes her to a tee!




Isn't he the handsomest little man you've ever seen?!

PPA Convention

So I told you all I'd write about the convention and I just simply haven't made the time. After I got back, I was trying so hard to implement as many changes as I could, that I forgot to follow up on a few of them! The convention was just simply amazing. Dad and I went to an average of 3 classes each day we were there. In addition, there was an over 400 booth expo. It was just amazing. Some highlights (for me, at least!):

1. Getting to see and spend oodles of time with my dad - that was beyond cool.



2. Attending the seminar given by Liana Lehman. She is a phenomenal photographer with tons of energy. She was featured in PPA magazine last year during the wedding edition and I've followed her work ever since. I learned more from her than any other presenter there. I left her speech with a huge new thought process on how to approach my business. It was amazing.




3. Meeting and having my picture taken with David Jay, another spectacular photographer. He has the most amazing business sense of anyone I've seen. He's found ways to market himself and make himself stick out. I'm just in awe.



4. Going to the Canon booth...you can't believe the awesome gear they had there! I got a free CF card holder just for filling out a survey. Of course, my wish list grew exponentially...



5. Seeing and touching the different albums from the many album makers out there. I have been trying to decipher who I should choose as my album vendor for quite some time. The choices are staggering. But Dad humored me and came along as I touched and stared at and picked apart at least 2 dozen different companies. What I found out, was that I really have a good thing going with SharedInk. Their product is great and their customer service is unbelievable. And if you know me, you know that customer service is really hugely important to me.



6. Getting tons and tons of new ideas for my business - from marketing to new ways to run my workflow. It was just amazing. Well worth the money.



7. 7. Walking on the Riverwalk with Dad. We only did this on the first night we were there, but that place is amazing. I would love to see it when it's warmer out. The vendors were so interesting. I can't possibly describe all the sites and sounds we took in that night, but it was awesome. We had dinner at this really awesome Mexican restaurant. The margaritas were great, but cold!

8. Did I mention I got to spend time with my dad?!

9. Realizing I can actually survive on little sleep and much walking all in the same day. ...And I HATE trains! Especially loud noisy ones that beep every second as they drive through the lobby of the hotel I'm staying at between the hours of 4:00 and 5:00 am! But the morning coffee was pretty good, huh Dad?

10. Getting to see the Alamo. It was really cold and windy that day and neither of us had real jackets, so we basically ran around the outside of the Alamo getting spectacular images (can't tell by the image that it's less than 30 degrees, can you?!). That was really fun, though!

Dad and I had purchased plane tickets to leave on Tues, even though the convention lasted until late Tues night. Thank goodness we did. There was an ice storm (by the way, the weather in Boston was consistently at least 10 -20 degrees warmer every day we were in TX. It was FREEZING!). Many flights were cancelled (including Dad's flight :-( home, but he managed to get a flight out that night). I was reading on Wed that all flights were cancelled and that many people were stuck there until Friday. It was amazing.