Christie Duffer. She is one of those girls with incredible amounts of natural beauty, not only outside but inside as well. Her personality just radiates and she has such a natural joy and sweetness to her. After we met through a friend at Starbucks, she contacted me to do some pictures and I was thrilled. I posted only a few of my favorites… but wow, this girl is photogenic. 🙂 One of the things she mentioned up front was how she doesn’t like her “no smile” look. No problem! We stayed away from it most of the time (I am the same) but on one particular pose we gave it a whirl…. and WHOA, watch out! She rocked it. (it’s one of my favorites from the day!) Thanks for allowing me to photograph you Christie… you are absolutely gorgeous and I loved getting to know you!
I’m sitting at my desk researching about my new venture… building a well in Kenya, Africa. Midway through I get a little thirsty (reading about all this water and all) so I simply walk myself downstairs to my kitchen, pull out my nice little Britta pitcher and poor myself a glass of clean, sanitary and safe water. It’s cold, refreshing and it took me about 30 seconds to have it right there in front of me, at my fingertips, ready to drink. Pretty humbled as I walked myself back up to my desk and continued reading about the crisis… let me say it again… CRISIS in Kenya.
When I decided this past December to support Living Water through my business (you can read about it in my previous blog update here), I really didn’t know much about the water crisis at all. After I started my research, my heart breaks for the conditions of thousands of villages around the world that don’t have access to clean drinking water. It not only causes 90% of all diseases in the world and claims the lives of 5,000 children under the age of 5 every day, but it’s also the very thing that keeps them trapped in their poverty. “Time Poverty” is the term they use… not because they don’t have the ability, opportunity, or desire to make a better life for themselves, but because 40 billion hours of labor are wasted each year because they’re forced to spend the majority of their day walking to places where they can get clean water. At the very bottom of this post is a graph showing the importance of clean water. The image is used with permission from Living Water International.
But yes, my endeavor…. building a well!! Through Jamie Grant Photography every purchase made, session contracted, wedding booked, and print ordered – a portion of the proceeds will go towards building this well! At the end of 2011… the hope is to have an entire well dug and a whole village positively affectively by the clean water they will be able to access by this well.
One of the other exciting things about this well-building mission, is that my fans can follow along with me every step of the way. As we continue to strive to meet this goal, continual progress updates can be found here! Currently (as you’ll see when you click on the link) the well is 19% completed!! I’ll be continually updating this page so be sure to follow along as we build. I’m pretty pumped to know that my small little passion here in the middle of central Illinois can affect hundreds of lives on the complete opposite side of the world. Meanwhile, check out this graph which depicts how essential clean water is for development!
I’ve been able to breath a little easier the last couple months during my slower season. While I had two weddings in January, I have zero this month and March – and while I LOVE photographing weddings, it has been a nice and much needed break (for my sanity).
BUT the fun part is I get to concentrate on other photography that I don’t get to as much during wedding season… newborns. Oooooh how I love them. I loved them before I had my baby, but now that Elyse is big. And crawling (a new development), it’s even more wonderful to get to photograph these sweet little babies and remember when she was so tiny.
I got the privilege of photographing two beautiful little girls, Ella & Quinn. Both just absolutely sweet and adorable. Here is just a one little peak of each of these beautiful little girls. The first photo is of Ella. The second of Quinn.
Tutus. A weakness of mine for sure. When I see a sweet little baby in a tutu, I melt. So when I found this cutie little black tutu on Etsy for super cheap… I could not resist.
I take photos of Elyse with my big camera every so often but believe it or not I do most of my memory making with my fancy schmancy iphone (so professional of me). However, there are definitely occasions to bust out all the stops for the pro pics – the kind that I’ll go back to cry over when she turns 13 and those that will hang on our walls for 20 years. So since I don’t go nuts on a daily basis – I did go all out (as much as you can with a makeshift studio in the dead of winter) when she turned 6 months, which was January 24th.
Anyways… I’m super excited to blog these!! Not only because I was so pleased with how they turned out, but also because I’m pretty much crazy about my daughter and think she’s the most beautiful thing in the world (although I could be biased. Maybe). She’s definitely got the cheese smile down for the camera though… I think she’s used to it by now.
And I did go a little overboard on these…. (I think I have 150… eeek!). It’s going to be torture to figure out which to put around our house. And obviously… the ones where I’m apart of the photo were taken by my fabulously talented husband Brandon. So da da dahhh! My baby girl….
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- I offer different storyboards to clients for display.. here is one with some of my favorites that I’m considering getting for our home!
My very first correspondence with Krystyna she told me how impressed her fiance was with my work and how hard of a person he is to impress 🙂 Awww, super sweet! That made me feel so good – but was definitely a little intimidating! Especially when they booked their wedding and we scheduled an engagement session a good three hours away! I definitely wanted to make sure he was still “impressed” after our session. After getting some gorgeous weather and photographing in beautiful Long Grove – the pictures turned out fabulous and Jasand and Krystyna loved their pictures! Both of these two were much fun to work with. While Jasand was so down to earth, Krystyna was fun and had such a mysterious look and personality to her. I really enjoyed getting to know them both and am excited to get to photograph their June wedding! Here are just a few of my many favorites…
