Ok I am so busy these days it is crazy! A good crazy to be sure. Been shooting some jobs, been packing up the house, been sick in bed. We get our new house this Friday and we couldn’t be more excited! There will be lotsa work to be done for sure, in fact, more and more things pop up every time we go to the house. We just keep getting more ideas! So that will keep me pretty busy forever for the next couple of years! So look for a new category to show up here, a home improvement one! I’ve also been shooting quite a bit and being asked to bid on some great gigs. Did an assignment for Charlotte magazine, two assignments for Our State magazine and shot a quick ad for a local restaurant, Mez. I will try to post some of these shots as soon as they are cleared or published. I have a few more gigs on the books also.

For the 4th of July, my aunt and cousin, who live in Minnesota, came in for a visit. They stayed up at the compound with my parents and we had a bbq. It was great to see them. My aunt Anita is pretty close to my age and while I was growing up and when we lived in MN, we spent quite a bit of time together. She helped me learn how to color! we would spend time in the summer at our great grandmothers farm and that was always some kind of trip! We often share memories from those times. Things like how my grandmother would always always make hamburger steak for dinner with fried potatoes. How grandpa would sit in his chair and watch wrestling and not talk to us. They lived on an 80 acre dairy farm that they bought around 1915 or so. They still had some cattle when I would go, but it was not at full production. Good times, good times! Erica is my cousin. She is 24. I didn’t really know Erica growing up as we lived in NJ, or where ever I was, and they lived in MN. Erica went to UM and has a degree in some kind of outdoors stuff. She has a huge love for the outdoors as I do and she loves snakes and frogs and turtles and all kinds of other forest creatures. She has a great job doing studies for the state on habitat and animal  populations. While at the compound my parents farm, she poked around and found some toads, some frogs and a few snakes. She knows where to look. She just finished a turtle study where she got to spend 5 days in a canoe setting traps ( no kill traps! ) and counting the turtles. I was quite jealous. She has a huge tattoo of a bull snake on her shoulder and I wanted to get some shots of her and the rest of the family who were there. It was a fun time.

Here are some portraits:

Erica

Erica

Erica

Mr. Toad, I think she called it a Fuller’s Toad. correction - it is a Fowler’s Toad!

Aunty Anita

Jake tearing up the country road!

Regan smiling for the camera.

Mom

Lesley

Uncle Terry

Bella!