Today is Jonathan's 35th birthday! 

Yesterday our friends, Monroe and Sarah, took Jon to Chuck E. Cheese Pizza for his birthday!  The waiters sang to him, he had candles on his birthday pizza, and he even wore a birthday boy crown!  It was fun to watch my hubby have so much fun playing skeeball and video games!

I do have photographs and will post later--

I am married to the kindest, sweetest, most talented boy in the world!  And I happen to think he is a pretty awesome photographer, too!  I have been meaning to talk about his extra photography work for a while, and now is a perfect time to show some of his competition prints that he entered in the Kentucky Professional Photographer's Association Fall Seminar this past October!

Jon placed third overall in the print competition and was also awarded a cash scholarship to use toward any advanced photography seminars and classes.  We strongly believe that it is a vital part of a photographer's life to constantly learn about new techniques, trends, and ideas--this scholarship will come in handy not only to help pay for those expensive seminars, but also because our clients will benefit from the new knowledge we gain!

Here are the prints that did really well in the competition--

This image has become sort of a signature print for us--it is of Patricia and Mark during their first dance at their wedding this past April!  So intimate and beautiful!  And it was awarded the October/November cover of "Kentucky Bridal Magazine!"  I will post some specific information about that later, but for now I want to say that this shot is a reason why our wedding couples end up ordering enlargements of their first dance shots--they are so different from what other photographers capture...


This shot is SO amazing to me!  These are bright orange sea nettles that Jon photographed at the Ripley's Aquarium down in Gatlinburg this past summer.  No, he didn't go deep-sea diving, but he used available light to take away the reflection from the glass and did some high-saturation in the post-processing after he touched it up a bit.  Everyone has asked us when we had time to go diving!  Um, we don't have time to that...


One thing we DO take time to do, though, is go on week-long hiking trips during the occasional slow-time with the business.  This is Creation Falls in Natural Bridge State Park, where we went for our honeymoon 6 years ago!  I love the dreamy quality of this image, and black & white is always beautiful!


And this is a panoramic image that we are very proud of--it is from Stephanie and Joe's summer wedding at the Huber Winery!  So moody and gorgeous!  Love it!


As part of his award from the fall seminar, Jon also gets to enter the state photography competition free of charge!  I will keep you posted on how the images do--Jon also will be entering some new prints, so I will post those later as well!

Happy Birthday, sweetie!  I love you sooooooo much!