Seniors 2010

With school about ready to start it means that Whitlock Photography is in the middle of a busy High School Senior season. We always enjoy getting to photograph each senior that comes to us. The High School Senior session is always interesting and often unique is a special way. This year we have done the Jeep in the mud, the Paramount Art building session, the old train station and several of the alleys in Ashland, the snake in the grass session and the farm/horse session. More of the farm/horse session will be posted later. The weather has caused us to worry about working outdoors, but we have only had one outdoor session rained out. We went to photograph Heidi at the farm and as usual the weather was threating all afternoon. Once we arrived at the farm we photographed Heidi at several locations with her beautiful horse and even with a calf. It is great to work with Seniors, there are alot of ideas that these young minds have and to get to talk to them about their plans and to learn that we still have students that are really excited and are preparing for careers in every job field makes us continue to love our work.

Meet Baby " B R A D Y "

How precious is this baby Brady?!?! I actually missed out on helping Bill with this session but from looking at the images I can tell he is adorable. Oh my goodness, I bet he has grown so much just since Griffin & Danielle brought him in for his session. Well, I would guess that he couldn't help from being anything else but cute.............look at his Daddy & Momma!!! LOL!! Bill said that he was kinda' hungry during the photo session and they had to take a few breaks to let him eat, then take a few more and eat and take a few more. LOL!!!! Yea, these little guys need lots of lovin' & attention and I'm sure thats never a problem. I know that Marilyn just has to be gah-gah over him and enjoys spoiling.....oops, I mean spending time with Brady. But hey, isn't that what grandparents are supposed to do?!?! I thought his little cowboy outfit with the fringe was just toooo cute! And the little bare butt one was precious too. The blanket that they brought in with them said "Thank Heaven For Little Boys", and isn't that the truth. I guess I might think that way since we do have an 18 month old grandson. I hope that everyone enoys this little preview of Brady's photo session. :)

Back to school

In just a few days school will be starting again. It was only yesterday that it was the last day of school. Since most of our photography is photographing high school students I'll let my thoughts be on them. Now is crunch time for some of the seniors that just graduated. Hopefully all of them have decided to continue their education. Back to my thoughts about the new school year. For the incoming freshmen now is the time for the nerves to be barking a bit. Being a freshmen is a big change for them. For some the change will be very difficult but for most of them it will be about watching the varsity, with their classmates playing, every Friday night on the football field, going to dances and experiencing the life of a high school student.

For the Seniors in the class of 2010 it will be the start of a fast and demanding senior year.
Decisions that will affect their entire life will be made in the next few months, but during the course of the year lifetime bonds are being made and have been made. Several of my classmates took the riverboat luncheon cruise Saturday and on Sunday Theresa and several of her classmate meet at Armco Park for some food and a lot of memory sharing and laugher. This wasn't for any other reason than enjoying the company of friends made long ago.

Theresa and I love photography because we make friends with these students often in their freshmen year and continue to photograph them for events and activities throughout their high school years. Prom is one of the high light days of the entire for us. We love seeing the couples come in with the girls in their beautiful dresses and the guys in tuxs.

Yes school is about to start and Theresa and I are looking forward to seeing our friends again.

"Distinguished Leader" Rachel

Rachel was one of the first seniors from the BC Class of 2010 to come in this summer. Well as you can see, she is "SO" gorgeous and had an absolutely fabulous session! I thought the black & white close-up pose was amazing & could be on the cover of a magazine or something!!! I think it is so fun to have the wind blown hair goin' on. She is very photogenic & we were so excited after her session cause we could just tell that her images were gonna be GREAT!!! Since we knew that she was getting ready to leave for Governors Scholar & we were a bit anxious for her to see her images I immediately posted a couple of them on FB & MS the very next day. WELL...........I got a little ahead of myself and did things out of my normal routine. Generally it takes at least a week or longer after a session before I do that & at the same time I usally write a little something along with some images on our blog. So needless to say, I completely forgot to post anything about Rachel after doing that. I'm so sorry Rachel, if I only had a brain honey!! LOL!! I seriously didn't mean to leave you out, but with all of the other things plus the added computer problems that has been going on around here lately anything could happen. Thank you all for being so nice and understanding about everything and we do appreciate your kindness. I know that she has probably had a wonderful time at GSP and should be about ready to come home by now. I can't believe school will be starting in just a couple of weeks or so! Where has the summer gone?!?! Well I hope that you all enjoy this little preview of some of Rachel's images from her session. =)

The love for computers

As I stated a few days ago we have been having computer problems. We got one computer back up to speed without too much grief. We don't have all the software in it but at this time it's business as normal.

However the other computer has a completely different story. First it wasn't kind enough to just die, it has to go with a lot of misery. Maybe it didn't want to go to the scrap heap, maybe it was just tired of having to work too many hours per day and sometimes seven days a week, whatever the cause it went down fighting. Maybe it was just fighting us or just enjoying all the grief that it caused us for several days. I thought the purchase of a new computer would cause the grief to stop. First there is Vista 64, this is one sorry OS. Almost all the software refused to work with 64. This meant getting new software or a least updating almost all the software.
The SECOND source of grief was the purchase of Photoshop CS4. Since this is a 833 MB file a special downloader software was needed for the download. I will admit that most if not all of the download problems were caused by me. I'm going to say that I knew exactly what I was doing and did not cause the download problems. I started trying to download CS4 midday on Monday. No progress Monday, no progress Tuesday and Wednesday started out the same. I would like to now tell about the Customer/Tech Support that Adobe has. Actually I don't even want to think about it. While Adobe has support people in the USA they don't want you talking to him. The first 8-10 calls landed me in India. Now I don't care where you live and what language you speak!!!!!!!!!!!!!!until I need help with a problem. I want my help person to speak the America version of English. Over the years my hearing has adjusted to understanding the America version of English (I do have problems with the Boston version). The first 3 or 4 calls contected me with someone that I couldn't understand at all, then the next call the woman could speak good English but the connection was bad. Then I started demanding a refund and was told that it would take 2 billing cycles. 2 billing cycles means at least 1 month for my refund. That is Adobe's refund policy, to this I polity informed them that my refund policy was: NOW. They took my money real fast for the purchase, they could do the same for the refund. Of course the person in India didn't agree with me. Finally on Wednesday afternoon something in CS went wrong and I got connected to a man in the good old US of A. In a few minutes he had directed me how to fix the problem and I finally got CS4 loaded. I did tell them that I had plenty of time to burn since I had nothing to do with the computer not working and I would try my best to cost Adobe all that I could by spending alot of time talking (yes Talking) to them. So if you are planning to buy CS4 I suggest that you call a reseller and have the program shipped to you. This way you will avoid needing drugs to calm down and it will be quicker than trying to download. Then Adobe was nice enough to allow me to fill out a survey about my level of customer satisfaction. Don't they ever learn. I actually think I'll be back to normal about Tuesday or Wednesday of week.

I can remember the days of film and how we thought that Digital was going to solve all our problems. Kodak must have had really bad customer for us to think that life was going to be better after film.

"Heidi" BCDL 2010

Heidi was the last of our BCHS Distinguished Leader seniors that we photographed this summer. She and her Mom stopped by the studio a few weeks prior to her session to just ask a few questions and to schedule her appointment. At first I think she probably thought that she didn't have anything to bring with her but after talking with her briefly and looking at samples here in the studio she realized she had lots of interesting stuff! She is very active in her youth group at church, and is in both the marching band & choir at BCHS. Heidi is one very busy girl!!! She spent several weeks or months in Japan a couple of years ago and had lots of things from her travels there. The kimono, japanese shoes, fan, pottery pieces, chop stix and Pokemon characters & books were just some of the things she brought along. And she is very involved with 4H and she had stuff to go along with that too. She mentioned during her consultation appointment that she had horses, so we went to their farm & photographed her with "Oreo" (I think that was her horses name?!?). I know they had lots of animals and she told me all of their names and it made me kind'a hungry....... LOL!!! No really some of the names were like Sugar, Butter, Oreo & stuff that makes you start craving some kind of dessert or something LOL!!! I hope that you all enjoy this little sneak preview of her session, ENJOY!!

Shelby "FHS" Sr.Salute

During the last few weeks we have been having some computer issues and hopefully we have them all resloved now. During all of that, somehow Shelby's images were lost in the shuffle of things so now that we are back up & running we just wanted to make sure that we got her up here. I'm not sure if these are all of the same images that I had posted before. She is such a "cutie" and I'm sure that everybody who knows her already has found that out by now!!! She has the most bubbly type personality and was so easy to work with. We just had the pleasure of meeting the rest of her family the other day. She has an adorable 3yr.old brother Isaac & a little sister Faith. They think their BIG SIS is the greatest, and it was funny how excited they were watching her DVD. I think Faith will grow up to look exactly like Shelby one day........... she definitely has a great role model!! Shelby's Dad had been wanting to share these with people at work so I hope that you guys enjoy these! :)