Wow! It is a busy January around here! We are so excited to reveal our gorgeous January weddings (Hello newlyweds!) to you all and to gush about the most beautiful venue we've ever shot at. As soon as you see the pictures, you're going to want to get married there. But before all that, we're celebrating Nate's birthday this weekend with friends and family from out of town. So please excuse any delay in email responses. I'm trying to juggle keeping up with our emails/voicemails and being a good hostess. :)

Any LOST fans out there? How much did you love the season premiere this last week?! We are big LOST fans so we decided to have a little premiere party this week in celebration of the return of our beloved characters. We had some Dharma snacks and lots of good friends around. If you are not already addicted to this show, I'm sure this season will pull you in. It's so fantastic!

Dharma beverage rations.


Heather & Stephanie from Ha! Photography

Hello dear friends! I am hiding out inside today because, as the last Saturday before Christmas, I know the outside world is crazy today! We have actually finished pretty much all of our holiday shopping. I think I just need some more stocking stuffers, and a few gifts for our family and we'll be done! But, I plan on venturing out during the week sometime when the malls are less crazy.

Recently I have been asked by a lot of people how we get our skies to look the way they do in pictures. I am so flattered by the question because bold skies are one of our favorite things to shoot and we take a lot of pride in the images! I'm not going to lie to you, a lot of the magic happens in the camera. A good quality lens will help a lot as well! I know you were wishing for some secret Photoshop trick but I don't really have one for you. You have got to get your pictures looking good straight out of the camera if you want them to look good after they've been edited. There's only so much you can do with a poorly taken picture. So, step one: make sure you have got your settings down in camera! The editing is the easy part! We use Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop CS3 for our post processing and we have a storehouse of textures, actions, and presets that we use for our work. For our big sky pictures, we generally use the actions from Totally Rad.

Here is a before and after from one of our recent big sky portraits with our camera settings and actions of choice:

Now go out there and capture those gorgeous skies all around you!

Happy Holidays!