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hello everyone!! I have a Kickstarter campaign for my calendar!! back it if you can and spread the word!!!

 

Awesome calendar needs funding!!  click here!

 

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How to Preserve Photos and Why It’s So Important.

I can’t express how much I agree with this article. Print those photos, folks!

 

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It’s been ages since I have posted anything and it’s mostly because I have been super busy doing all kinds of things. The summer was good and full of new opportunities.
I will have to back track and go over some of the highlights of all the weddings and portraits I have done. I even travelled to Houston for a wedding and stopped off in New Orleans for a couple days and took some good touristy photos there too! hahah!

Right now, to get back into the blogging, I won’t leave my readers without something interesting. I am currently donating 20% of all my portrait sessions and wedding packages to Susan G. Komen Coastal Georgia Affiliate!

Please book your appointments for whenever during the remainder of October and all of November and help support this great cause!

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During my volunteering for Susan G Komen, I get to meet a lot of very amazing people! One of them was featured in my blog a few weeks ago. She was May’s Survivor of the month. The day that I did  her portraits, it was very sunny and I wasn’t completely satisfied with her photos so I asked her if she would come out again and bring her father with her for a father/daughter session.

She agreed and we headed over to Forsyth Park one afternoon and got some good shots of the two of them together. She is still fighting cancer, so these photos meant a lot to them.

That’s what I love about photos – that no matter what happens to someone, whether it is good or bad, you can always have them near in living color with photographs. They are there forever to hand down to the next generation!

So happy Father’s Day, Jerry! Your daughter, Sherray, is amazing!

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Adam and Danielle wanted to get married on the beach at sunset. They got their wish and said their vows as a big orange sun dipped slowly into the sea. Their ceremony took place on a part of the beach that I’d never been to before where you could actually see the sun go into the ocean at sunset, which is a rarity on the east coast.

We took the entire Golden Hour (hour before sunset) to take their photos and came out with some awesome, romantic shots. The golden light was beautiful and it was also a good place to get some great silohuette shots.

The couple had been together for a while and had beaten all kinds of odds, so I wish them all the luck in the world and hope that they have a happy life together!

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One of my former clients was lovely enough to pass my info along to her friends and I got three head shot sessions in the same day! It was great! The young ladies and gentleman were all students at Savannah Arts Academy in the theater program. They needed head shots for their end of year portfolios.

All three were great models and hopefully will be repeat clients!

I love being able to help actors and other performers out with their jobs. A great head shot can help someone a lot during an audition!

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For some reason, in the 10 years I’ve been photographing weddings and events in Savannah, I’d never had the pleasure of having a wedding in Forsyth Park!

I’d heard that it was a tricky place to shoot and it did prove to be that! Though, I am pretty sure that I got some good shots out of  it – at least my clients thought so!

So congrats Gary and Linda!

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A couple of weeks ago a shot some photos of a lovely bride, Jennifer, at the Bamboo Farm.  She was up for anything and it was a great shoot! We got to do some stuff that you normally wouldn’t get to do on a day of the wedding shoot with a bride.

The Bamboo and Coastal Gardens provide a great backdrop for all kinds of different types of photos! I love to shoot there!

 

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So I will admit, I’ve been SLACK in posting in my blog!!  Well that is about to change because I have a billion photos to show you guys and am not even sure where to begin.
First up will be some lovely photos of Jennifer in her wedding gown at the Bamboo Farm and Coastal Gardens! Then there will be some weddings, head shots, vintage car shoots and another bride posing with a Rolls Royce.

I promise! They will be coming soon!

 

 

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I had the pleasure of meeting this lovely lady, Sherray, the other day and was completely floored by her bravery and her story. This is the article that I wrote for Komen and her story. Just like I did for them, I’m not editing anything really….these are mostly her words and her message needs to be heard.

Sherray M.

May’s Survivor of the month, Sherray Muhammad, is truly an amazing lady whose story has really affected me.  I first met her on the way going down to river street to take her portrait for this article in the elevator. She was radiant and exuded a positive aura.

At the time, I she had not had time to fill out her questionnaire , so I asked her about her cancer story. She first told me this part of the story and I almost don’t really feel that I need to edit very much since she tells it better than I could paraphrase. This story needs to get out there for younger women to read,  “I’m a thirty-two year old African American woman who’s been diagnosed with breast cancer.  I was diagnosed on September 28, 2009, a day I’ll never forget.  My life has never been the same since that date.  I was experiencing an extreme amount of pain in my right breast and found a lump under my right arm.  I’d gone to the emergency room where I was told I only had an inflamed lymph node. I was prescribed hydrocodone for ten days and told to follow up with my PCP if I had further complications. The hydrocodone relieved the pain but upon completion,  the pain came back worse than ever.  One day I was watching a documentary about a singer/ song writer by the name of Minnie Ripperton.  In that documentary they spoke about this young woman thirty-one the same age I was who had lost her life in a battle with breast cancer. It was shocking to me that this woman had passed on at such a young age from something like this.  The next day I set up an appointment at the local health department, there was a waiting list so the appointment wasn’t for another month.
I kept my appointment but by that time my right breast had swollen to the size of a melon and was sensitive to any kind of touch.  I told the nurse practitioner about all that I had been going through. She was astonished when I removed my shirt and bra.  My breast was red with very defined veins.  She felt the lump under my arm and the one in my breast that I had been told in other doctors visits was “nothing to worry about” and ” I had naturally lumpy breasts”.  She had me shade in a diagram showing my pains and lumps and told me that she recommended that I get a mammogram immediately. She also stated it might be difficult to get approval because I was so young. She left the room and came back with a Susan G. Komen voucher for me to report to Memorial Medical University to have a mammogram.  The mammogram showed some abnormalities so they performed a biopsy on my lumps (the worst pain I ever felt).  I believe that was a Thursday. I was told the results wouldn’t be in until the next Monday.  Imagine my alarm when I received a call the next afternoon while working.  I was told that I had breast cancer and several appointments had been made for me to get an aggressive start on the situation. I met with my surgeon Doctor Ray Rudolph (awesome guy) and Brandy Payne another survivor.  I was told that I had the most aggressive form of breast cancer, terminology of which I’m still unclear.  This type of breast cancer had formed a mass, was in my lymph node and had attached itself to my skin cells.  This meant I wouldn’t be able to just have the mass removed, the entire breast had to go. Me, thirty-one year old me!  My breast cancer was in an advanced stage. Within the next ten days I had to have a PET scan, CT and MRI – none of which I was familiar. Then there was treatment,  my oncologist Dr.Grant Lewis, another awesome guy, said “We are shooting for cure”.

I underwent eighteen weeks of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy (my choice) and a month and a half of radiation.  All signs of the breast cancer were gone. Although I had no hair or breasts, I felt great.  Slowly over the course of a year of observation I began experiencing back, rib, and pelvic pains. I went to the emergency rooms three times about my back and ribs thinking I’d pulled a muscle or something.  Each x-ray revealed nothing “probably just a bruised rib” they said here’s some more hydrocodone for the pain “it should feel fine in a month or two.”  During my six month check-up with my surgeon Dr. Ray Rudolph I told him about the pains I’d been experiencing.  To rule anything out, he ordered a body/bone scan. Instead the test revealed the breast cancer had traveled through my lymphatic system to my first and seventh rib, pelvic bone, and skull.  There is no surgery for this type of breast cancer; chemotherapy is only used as a control mechanism at this point, and radiation is obsolete.  This is it guys, stage four.  More MRI, Pet, and CT scans came next and thanks be to God there are no lumps in my brain or any of my organs to date.  I’m back on chemotherapy three Wednesdays a month indefinitely.
I am extremely grateful to the Susan G. Komen program because without it I may not have made it to see the age of thirty-two, nor would I have the funding to pay for health care.  I have met some of the most caring people in affiliation with this program and to each and every one I am eternally grateful.
If I could say anything to everyone out there it would be…. Ladies don’t ignore your bodies, get checked annually and do self exams in between.  If you feel pains or unusual things happening to your body get checked right away don’t wait it could mean your life.  Families of those going through this ordeal, be supportive and positive, this is a hard thing to endure and it’s even harder without support and positivity around us.  To those of us that are experiencing this terrible disease the strength is in us fight it, do what your doctors tell you is your best course of action, eat healthy, exercise, and take it easy.  Most importantly if you believe in a higher power offer the burden to him/her and believe that you can be healed.  After that don’t worry about it anymore live each day to the fullest.  This thing affects everyone you either are someone or know someone that has gone through it or is going through it.  Support Susan G. Komen and let’s find a cure and end this madness.”

Sherray said that  keeping a positive attitude was the key to her living her life now. She also said she was planning on speaking to some groups about her experience as her way of being an advocate. I left her response virtually untouched, because I have two very close friends who were also diagnosed with breast cancer when they were in their twenties and while my friends who are also 32 and 33 years old now, just like Sherray, they are doing fine. This story hit very close to  home and my hope and my joy being in the position I am to help get this information out to people is to hopefully allow another young woman to read Sherray’s brave words and hopefully save some lives.