Joshua Mahar Photography » Wedding and Portrait Website

So I have been working on getting a new family blog off the ground. We have been using blogger as our platform since Ainsley was born, and frankly, I am tired of it. Blogger is great, and free, and accessible. But…it sucks at pictures. I know, there are ways to tweak it, but having used it at one time as a photo-blog, I know first hand that it is simply not built as an image displaying option. I have been more than thrilled with my current blogging platform, and since I am allowed two installs of the code, I figured that we ought to do the family blog up right. I feature a lot of images of my daughter here, and between you and me, I think you know why (SHE IS SO DARN CUTE). But the new blog will give my wife Sarah a great place to put more of her photographical work, and to share her own thoughts about this crazy thing called life.

I look forward to having a place that we can feature more of our family focused images (not that I expect to leave off sharing those here), as well as our thoughts and joys and struggles as we walk down this road of being a Photography family in 2010. Feel free to check it out, though I warn you know…its still a bit rough. http://themahars.com/

Cheers

Ok…I couldn’t resist putting this up!

I have been sick for like 5 days. Last Wednesday night my usual sinus related cold hit, and I was done. I didn’t start recovering until Saturday, which was good, because for the first part of the day it was gorgeous! We were out looking for camera bags, because I have needed a lens bag to compliment what I already have, and the only place I know that I can actually play around with Think Tank bags is Glazers in downtown Seattle. So all three of us went up to the city to putz around in a camera store for an hour. Afterwards we decided that we couldn’t make a trip up to Seattle without spinning by Red Mill Burgers for my absolute favorite burger in the universe! This was Ainsley’s first Red Mill encounter and it was a swimming success.

Here is the Inter Bay location

and, I couldn’t help but take some shots of a really cool old yard with this sweet building

So this is me…and these shots were taken by my wonderful wife Sarah. She has just started getting excited about photography, and these are the fruit of that excitement. How’d she do?

So tonight, at like 8:30 pm, Ains decides that she would like to go for a walk…after the walk she and Sarah come in and Ainsley asks to go out to the back porch. I look over and she is wearing our head lamp. Here is a shot of her out on the porch. She spent most of the time dancing around.  Sorry neighbors…

Occasionally, I have the opportunity to take tons of pictures of kids! I have a lot of opportunity with Ainsley, but she has become really used to the camera, and ignores my attempts to get her to do cute stuff on command. Friend’s children have not built up this amazing defense mechanism. It is also really rewarding to nail shots of kids just running around being kids. One other thing I love is that their parents are usually really thrilled that they just had someone take some great shots of their children for free. Here are a few highlights from the day.

I love this guy! This the proud father of the birthday girl.

These two are mine! Love this image.

I thought I was going above and beyond by agreeing to read to them. At one point there were like 5 kids all huddled around. It turns out that they suckered my wife two weeks ago at the last party that I missed because I was shooting in Napa.

Earlier this month I got to go spend some time with family, as kind of a catch up visit since we missed them around Christmas. My sister’s boyfriend came along for the visit and I figured that I would subject him to my camera. It was fun coaxing the shot that I was looking for out of him: he is a great musician and I wanted to get him a great shot for any promo stuff he might want to do in the future.

Back at the end of 09 I had the opportunity to visit family down in Cottage Grove OR, where my cousin was getting married. They asked me if I would shoot for them, and I could think of no better wedding gift than wedding images. I am nearly finished with them, and I wanted to share a few shots from the day.  The first is a standard back of the church shot, but I love the coloring from the stain glass on the wall. The second is of my cousin and her new husband singing a beautiful worship song, accompanied by David’s mandolin playing. It was very nice, and a great expression of their love for each other. The final one is a bit more sentimental, at least to me. This is my Grandma Barbara. Since she lives in Oregon, and we have lived 4 of the last 5 years in Massachusetts, and the last year here in the Seattle area, it has been very difficult to see her. This trip was the first opportunity for her to meet our daughter. She also has fairly pronounced memory loss and didn’t recognize me, though I was prepared for this. I have no idea what is in store, but this might have been one of the last times I will get to see her. She is an ordained pastor, and has been doing her best to follow Jesus for the majority of her life. This is her singing. This was one of the images that I most wanted to make that weekend.  

This last weekend I got to unplug a bit and go visit family that I wasn’t able to see over Christmas. The first outing involved a 40min drive up to my wife’s Aunt and Uncle’s place in Redmond. We had a very nice time playing Pinochle, and exploring the grounds of their very nice farm. They have four horses, and enough property for you to forget how close to the city you really are. I had a lot of fun there, and I have a number of fine art images to post, along with some portraits. One of the nice things about this time of year is that I get to flex my nature and landscape fine-art muscles a bit, which is fun! For those of you looking for more wedding and portrait images, I do have a number of posts planned for the rest of this month, so know that I’ve got your back! Cheers