Family Backlog: the Holidays

My most used excuse last year was something along the lines of, "I fell behind on my photos and have to do a backlog post to catch up." This isn't one of those posts at all! For once, I had a perfectly good reason for not posting these photos: Christmas Presents! I tend to give out photos to family for Christmas and since my family likes to check my blog all the time, I didn't want to spoil anything. So, here are a bunch of family pictures from Thanksgiving and Christmas. The above shot was my best result for a group photo of the grandkids for my mom. James knows where the camera is at! I tried to get the parents behind my camera so all the kids would look my way, but Hannah had a melt down and had to get treats to keep her from bawling in all the photos. Ah well, we'll try it again next year!

Here's Hannah as her normal bubbly self. Remember when we thought her curls would never come in? Boy howdy, have they!

Grace wasn't nearly as excited as I was about the sheep and goats, but she thought the animal bench was pretty sweet.

We got a few snow flurries on Thanksgiving morning, so the kids were all bundled up. Can we talk a minute about Hannah's fashion sense? I mean, technically, it's her mom's fashion sense, but come on! So many stripes! I'm totally jealous of this look!

Grace had some choice faces she'd been working on. I've honestly never seen these looks from her before!

While I struggled to get a full group shot, James and Aria were totally down for a siblings portrait.

James loves being the big brother and big cousin.

When I realized I'd lost their attention, I told them to make silly faces. The two that are around the camera more often got it right away.

Woah there, Hannah!

It's every photographer's job to get that blurry Christmas lights shot, but I upped my game this year by throwing the petzval lens on my camera to get some trippy bokeh!

Just when things got really hectic at work, I came down with the flu and was locked in my room under a self imposed quarantine. While I definitely needed the down time, I missed out on so much! The day I went to the walk in to find out that the 103 fever was indeed the flu, I was supposed to go into the city to photograph Vincent D'Onofrio! You can't imagine how bummed I was to miss that opportunity, but I'm hoping to catch him the next time around and his PR people were super understanding. The flu also meant that I had to miss out on the Christmas Festivities. It sort of felt like Christmas never happened. I did take part in our family's Christmas cookie tradition to a lesser extent and of course wearing protective gloves. My mom filled in as dough master for me and my brothers came through as they always do.

We kept Grace busy decorating the tree while we were busy in the hot kitchen.

I like the chaos of this shot. This is what five hours of cookie making looks like!

Jimmy wanted to show off his Utili-Kilt. I like the juxtaposition of his shot with the one of Hannah below. It's probably my favorite picture I've taken of Hannah. She looks like a miniature adult and that smile, OMG!

I tried to get a sibling shot, but Grace was doing silly poses and Hannah just has to imitate her big sister...

Christmas morning, Grace and Hannah got to open a few presents before chaos ensued. Hannah was crazy about her new dump truck; I couldn't believe her parents found a pink and purple truck!

Grace got a microphone that asks you to make silly poses, which she also loved.

Exchanging presents with dad before bursting into song.

When James and Aria showed up, things got a little crazy. We took turns until Hannah started grabbing any present she could find and subsequently opening it.

Everyone kept telling me to take a picture of Aria and Grace with their new clocks. This is what happens when two kids want nothing to do with a photograph because there are so many more presents to open. I also got a chuckle at the way Aria held hers.

Shrek!

I got Jimmy that super cool Wampa ice scraper. Thanks, Think Geek!

The girls insisted they get a picture of them in the giant box, and I aim to please!

Despite futile efforts to keep them upright, these wooden deer constantly fell over. 

I'm going to be focussing my efforts on the website redesign over the next couple of weeks, so I might not post all that much. I'd like to point out the new playlist at the top of the page. I've switched over to Spotify. It's not that I support Spotify and the ridiculously small amount of money they pay artists per song listen. It's that Grooveshark is viewed as even worse for the artist. While I like the ability for you to listen right from the web and add songs from my personal library, I feel it's important to give what little help I can to musicians. So, until I come up with a better solution thereby making this note completely unnecessary, I'm going with Spotify. That's my 2015 mix, which is a bit darker, but I'll get to that in another post.