Me In Front of the Camera??!! Almost Never!

I am going to be one of those mom's whose kids will look back and have very few images with their mom in them. That is not necessarily a good thing, but unfortunately it is the way it is. I love to take pictures and am not a big fan of being in front of the camera. But here we are again, it is almost time for Christmas Cards, my mind is twirling and whirling, what will we do for our family Christmas card this year? My friend Jana and I have gone out and shot small town Texas together on a few occasions, hopefully we will again soon, but last night we shot each other. We have a million pics of our own kids, but what we don't have are pictures with our husbands and for myself especially family pictures. So we kept the kid picture taking to a minimum and focused on entire families, and especially on us with our fabulous husbands. I put a couple of my favorites up. If I am not "in" the picture then I am the one taking the picture, i.e. Jana's fam and the ones of my kids. If I am "in" the pic then Jana is behind the camera. The best part of yesterday was just hanging out with Jana and her family. Jana and I met at the Estee Lauder counter where we had our make up done. I was going for COLOR! These colors are inspired by the lighting conference I went to a couple of weeks ago. The couple that taught the seminar said they always do wardrobe consults with their clients beforehand and they never, ever allow their clients to wear the white shirt and khaki pant or blue jean look. Why? You ask, because then their work would look like everyone else's. When clients ask me what they should wear for a portrait sitting, it is just easy to match the whites, blacks and denim's, let me tell you that putting your family in colors that work well together is not an easy task. But with much deliberation and closet scrounging and a trip to the store I think I did a good job and Jana did too, of showcasing color and making it look good. My goal was to use the colors of dark jewels, so the purples, teal, green, browns and then Derek in black because the shirt I found for him on sale at Kohl's was too small, worked like a dream. Jana's use of colors are dreamy, especially the one's of just she and Richard. (Yes, this is Dr. Beck) So enjoy these colorful images and the colors of bright eye shadow on my eyes, which is just what I was going for, funky and wild, so unlike my normal make up choices. Jana thanks for agreeing to go behind the camera to take pics of my sweet family!

These first five are of Jana and Richard and their sweet kids.






Jana and Brendon went back up to the local last night to get some rockin' pics of Brendon and his uber cool new skateboard.


Now my family. Jana took the first 2 here and the one of me towards the bottom, I took the rest.