The Hilton Hotel at VA Beach.

I've seen where many photographers have a mannequin to practice their lighting techniques. That way they can work on their own time and not have to worry about working with a real person. Well, I don't have a mannequin, but I do have a Zoe. My 70 pound lab/dalmatian mix will pretty much do anything for me to take her picture. I got a new softbox and wanted to take a few photos with it to see how they came out. My first subject choice is usually Rachel, but Zoe does just fine too.

After a while she does seem to get bored though. She doesn't run off but assumes the pose you see below. I think she rolls her eyes at me at times too.

Just realized I never posted the Christmas dress photos. These are some of my favorites. She is so expressive.

Didn't have to go to work today because of snow. So we braved the cold and shot a few today while running errands. Took this at a park in Salem.

To me, this image seems to convey the sense of cold that was the weather today.

Some of Rachel's 12 month photos. The rocking horse was a gift from my grandmother. Something she found somewhere and thought Rachel would like it. She rocked so hard that she kept sliding off the set. So we had about three rocks per try. It took a while, but we got a few on there with her looking at us.

Rachel was not extremely cooperative the first day we tried to do these photos. The last photo in this post pretty much sums up that day. So a couple of days later we were able to get a majority of the shots we kept.

"Hey!!!"

"Huh?"

"Cheese!"

This is Mabry Mill just south of Roanoke on the Blue Ridge Parkway. I took this late last summer. Lori and Rachel were out of town visiting family, and I went for a drive on the parkway (Something we used to do all the time before I got into photography. I wish I would have gotten in to it sooner. I remember all the places we went, but didn't think to take pictures.)

I almost didn't go out that day because it was raining, but I decided to suck it up and just go. I'm glad I did because for whatever reason this image is one of my favorite landscapes I've shot up to this point. The rain actually made the scene better in my opinion. You can't really tell it is raining in the photo, but the scene is more saturated because everything is wet.

These were taken over Thanksgiving break while visiting Lori's parents. We went out to hopefully get some photos for the annual Christmas card (which we got- thanks to Lori's dad, who is also a photographer). Of course I couldn't resist getting a few of just Rachel.

We actually made it back to Liberty for homecoming this year. It's the first time we've been to homecoming since we graduated. We thought this year would be a good one since they just opened the new upper deck. It was really nice. Of course we sat in the new section and the view was great.

All of these photos were taken from my seat. The reach of the 70-200 lens was a lot better than I initially thought it would be.