Another Salute to our Soldiers and Their Families

I recently stumbled across the website http://welcomehomeblog.com/ and had to share it. I never get enough of watching these videos. So many leave everything behind to go away and defend freedom around the world. EVERY soldier deserves these types of homecomings. God Bless our troops, the greatest military in the world!

And a friendly reminder...have the Kleenex box handy (the one's with the little kids get me every time :)

Let's try this again...

Ok, so we know...we're terrible bloggers! No posts in six months??? What on earth have we been doing? Well, to be perfectly honest we've been very busy. My lovely wife lost track of her schedule and took on a few more jobs than we had the capacity to handle (and had the audacity to do it right at the heart of deer season!). But that's all going to change. We're finally caught up except for one special project we need to finish and we can get back to nursing our little baby business. So now we start a new year which leads to new opportunities. In the coming weeks we will be rolling out a new referral incentive program, some exciting events for the year, and, as we will be rolling out a new product offering/pricing structure, a limited time discount toward the new pricing for those of you looking to book a session at any time this year. But more to come on that. There might even be more frequent blog posts as I believe I've finally talked my spouse into embracing the whole blog thing. For now we offer you a slideshow with some of our favorite images of 2010. Enjoy and as always, God Bless!

And now...The Brady Bunch (aka Tim & Renee Fisher Family)

After the fabulous wedding we had the pleasure of photographing, we were given the opportunity to photograph the new, very large, and happy family of Tim & Renee Fisher. These are two truly beautiful people and we feel very blessed to call them friends!

Showing the love!

The bro's.

Must See...Have Your Kleenex Box Handy

I found this while killing time at totalaxxess.com (I was supposed to be paying bills...yuk) and just had to share it. Now, very much unlike Sheena, I am not an overly emotional person...except when it comes to my kids. But this even made me sniffle a time or two. This is from www.tangle.com...kinda like YouTube for Christians. After you watch this be sure and check out the other videos they have.

God Bless Our Troops!!!

And now we present to you...

Mr. and Mrs. Allan Summerfield!

Today our family got a little bigger as we added a brother in law and his large family to our clan. June 26, 2010 marked the day when our sister Shera Lawrence (of American Idol fame) and Alan Summerfield (soon to be the next Michael Waddell...Google it for you non-hunters out there) were joined together in Holy Matrimony. It was a beautiful ceremony and the perfect way to start a lifelong journey together.

Alan & Shera, we love you both very much and pray that God grants you both many years of happiness together. May your hearts remain soft, your love remain strong, and your faith never die!

Below are a few pictures from an engagement shoot Sheena did for the happy couple. They are truly two beautiful people. But always remember, no matter what, your babies will never be cuter than ours :)

Memorial Day Followup

To those of you who were expecting a special slideshow to honor our military personnel on Memorial Day, as you already know, we were not able to create and post anything as we had promised. We apologize for this as we really wanted to do something to honor our military. Unfortunately we did not receive enough pictures to make a slideshow (we actually only received 3). Not to be deterred, we scoured the internet in search of images of military personnel, conflict photos, basically anything we could find. Again, unfortunately, there must be quite a marketplace for these type of pictures as just about everything we found came with a price tag :(

With that we would still like to keep the invitation open to send us photos of your friends, family, yourself, or anyone who is active or retired. We are going to try this again for the 4th of July and this time we are determined to get something posted for our troops. Please help us out by sending us anything you have. Of course you will retain all copyright ownership of the images. We will only be using them for the slideshow. Thanks in advance.

God Bless,
Michael & Sheena

Summer Vacation and a Few Special Deals!

We wanted to let all of our friends know that we are taking a little break during June and July to get caught up on pictures and get some much needed family time! We will be back in August ready to go full blast to work for you. Of course we will still be honoring all of our current bookings. Also, since Sheena has an inherent inability to say no to anything, if you have a once in a lifetime opportunity you would like us to capture in June or July (military family home on leave, out of town family visiting for a short time, etc), just give her a call and I'm sure she won't be able to say no.

With that said we would like to announce a couple of special deals we are initiating:

• Effective immediately we will be offering a 10% discount off of all of our services and products to active military personnel. We feel that this is the least we can do to honor and help out our armed forces who risk their life on a daily basis so that we can enjoy the many freedoms we take for granted.
  Military Wives (or husbands) - This applies to you as well...we would love to provide you with photographs of yourself, your children, or both so that you can share a little taste of home with your loved one who is in a distant land. Imagine his or her surprise and delight when they receive professional quality images in the mail to cherish and show off to their fellow servicemen and women. Just give us a call and mention our military discount when booking. We can also upload your custom slideshow to the web so that he or she can enjoy it while deployed.
• We are also accepting appointments for Fall Portrait Sessions. Aside from spring, there is no better time to capture your family alongside the beauty of God's creation. As an added incentive all portrait sessions for September, October, and November booked on or before July 9, 2010 will include a 20% discount off of any portrait order totaling $200 - $299 or 30% off of any portrait order totaling $300 or more. If you are interested give Sheena a call at 270-791-2175 or you can e-mail us at contact@sheenabrownphotography.com. Please don't delay as the available slots will fill up fast!
  
  
  God Bless,
  Michael & Sheena

Calling All Active Military, Veterans, and Families of Veterans

To honor all of our brave military men and women who are serving or have served for our country, we would like to create a slideshow which will be displayed on our blog for Memorial Day. But we need your help! We are asking that you send us any and all photos you have of active duty soldiers or veterans. The more the merrier as we would like to create something big to show our love and support for all of those who are and who have sacrificed for our great nation. Please send anything you have to contact@sheenabrownphotography.com by Saturday, May 29 (yeah, we know, short notice) so that we can have the slideshow ready to go up on Monday. Thanks in advance for anything you can send as we really want to make this happen.

God Bless,
Michael & Sheena

Lydia Barks Senior 2010

We finally finished with Lydia Barks' Senior pics and we are very pleased with how they turned out! We love all of our models but Lydia certainly made creating awesome looking pictures very easy. Below is a sampling and the full shoot can be found on our Facebook page. Thanks, Lydia, for letting us take these special pictures for you and we hope you enjoy them!

Tools of the Trade

Ok, so when we first started this blog, we said that it wouldn't all be about sharing pictures. So...it's time to live up to that promise.

One of the most frequent questions we are asked is what tools or software we use to create our awesome, spectacular, truly brilliant images. Ok, maybe it's not exactly stated like that but you get the point. So with this post we are going to give full disclosure on everything we use, how we use it, and why we use it. Or something like that.

Let's begin with a bit of history. When we started this thing we had a Canon S5 (I think), a flash, and big dreams. We thought hey, we'll start taking picture professionally, how hard can it be?                      Ok, the long pause there was me picking myself up from falling out of the chair with laughter. Looking back IT'S NOT THAT EASY!!!! Not to discourage any aspiring photographers but we had no idea what we were getting into. So anyway, with that said, click on the link below to see the official, quintessential list of what we use to do what we do (in no particular order):