I don’t read that many books.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy it – I actually love kicking back on the couch with a great book and a steaming cup of coffee.  It’s mostly a time issue.  When I’m not at work, I’m usually hanging out with my wonderful family.  And several nights per week, when they all start drifting off to bed, I start working on photography – editing pictures, designing albums, returning emails, writing contracts, blogging, etc.  On the nights when I’m not working, I’m getting some quality time with Sarah.  There are very few nights that I get a chance to sit down and just read.

Another reason I don’t read that often is that I am an obsessive reader.  Once I start a good book, I just can’t set it down – I have to know how the story ends!  And as I just mentioned, my life doesn’t allow me to get absorbed into books that easily!  However, currently, some of my English students are reading The Help and The Art of Racing in the Rain.  They both seemed interesting enough, so I started with The Help about 2 weeks ago and I could not put it down.  What an amazingly told story following the lives of three women in Mississippi in the early 60s.  My family was relieved when I finished that book because it was no short story!  I’ve managed to make it through The Art of Racing in the Rain mostly at work while the students are reading (a good chunk of it today) and I’m nearing the end.  This is seriously an intense story and I found myself in a pretty rotten mood about halfway through the day because I really threw myself into this story!  I guess I identified with the protagonist (a young dad with a 5-year-old daughter) a little too much.

I would certainly recommend either one of these books if you’re looking for a good story (probably The Help a little more).  It has been fun reading 2 books in nearly 2 weeks as this is a rare occasion for me.  I might have to just keep this up a little more, although I think I’ll stick with shorter books that I can get through in order to keep from shunning my family while obsessively reading until I am finished!

I was going back through my old blog the other day because I just hit my second blog-o-versary!  I’ve been blogging continually for two years now and I feel pretty good!  I’ve seen many people start blogs with grand intentions and then abandon them because it’s not an easy thing to keep up with.  At any rate, I realized that when I switched over to hosting my blog on my photography site, I kind of stopped blogging about life in general.  Sure, this is a photography blog and you should expect a good bit of photography posts up here!  But I love to write.  I majored in journalism!  So I decided to spend a little more time writing about life in addition to photography…so here goes.  If you’re just stopping by for pictures, come back soon.  If you don’t mind getting to know me a bit better, then keep on reading!

I’m usually an all-or-nothing kind of guy.  Like many men, I typically focus on the task at hand.  Unfortunately, life gets out of balance pretty quickly that way!  And when you’re trying to balance all that our family is balancing, only focusing on what’s directly in front of you is not a great way to go.  That’s the great thing about being married to a woman like Sarah.  She’s balanced.  She doesn’t forget that there is life outside of whatever is screaming for attention.  She gently reminds me to slow down…to stop and pray…to get out and enjoy the fresh air…to put priority on spending time with the ones I love.  We balance a lot around the Davis house.  I teach full time, we photograph weddings and portraits, Sarah has a blossoming business, we (well, mostly Sarah) homeschool our oldest daughter, we manage a property in NC, and Sarah recently enrolled in school to become a midwife!  Yeah, we’re a little crazy.  But that’s where balance comes in.  We don’t have it all figured out, but we’re getting there.  We’re learning the art of scheduling (being sure to include date nights and laundry days) and by God’s grace we’re hanging in there.  We’re even managing to experience some cool things going on in our lives right now that I’m excited to share!

-I felt the baby kick!  Sarah’s about 19 weeks along and we haven’t found out what we’re having yet.  Our daughters are hoping for another girl!  Either way, this kid will definitely have 3 mothers!  Kyla and Avery are two of the most nurturing and motherly girls I have ever seen.  We are loving them so much right now and are so thankful for the fact that they are best friends and love spending time together!

-We just found out today that Megan and John’s Halloween wedding is going to be featured in Virginia Bride magazine!  We’re working on picking out the right images from their big day.  Unfortunately, the issue won’t be out until the fall, but we’ll be sure to let you know when it hits the news stands!

-We’re headed to Charlotte to visit friends this weekend.  I haven’t been back since we moved in June, so it will be fun to catch up with a lot of people.  We’re also showing our house to potential tenants and I’m pretty sure we’ve found someone who wants to rent it already!

-We’ve been booking a lot of weddings already for the year.  I made a goal that I would like to book and shoot 20-25 weddings per year.  So far, we have 4 booked and we’ve got several other couples about ready to book as well!  Considering we’re still pretty new to Charlottesville and that we don’t spend a dime on advertising, I’m pretty excited!  We rely solely on referrals and social networking to get new business.  We’ve considered paying for advertising, but the small amount we’ve done in the past hasn’t generated any new business and the referral method fits our natural style and personalities too!  This time last year, we only had one booked and we moved out of state and we still ended up shooting nine weddings!  I have faith that there are many good things to come.

-We decided that Sarah should take a break from shooting any more weddings until well after the baby comes.  She was pretty beat after her last wedding!  Thankfully, our friend Maggie who worked with me on Meghan and John’s wedding agreed to step up and be my second shooter for a bunch of our 2010 weddings!  I’m so thankful to have someone like her to rely on.

And since this is a post about balancing life and it’s nearly 1:00AM, I guess I’ll wrap it up so that I can get some sleep.  Every post needs a picture, so here ya go.  One of the great things about living in Charlottesville is that we’re much closer to our families in Richmond.  We were able to make it down for my dad’s surprise 39th (again) birthday party last week!  It was such a blessing to be able to see my dad as well as my brother and his family on a Monday night!  Here’s my dad opening his presents with the grandkids!

I met Jen this summer as our family was in the middle of the craziness that was our dual-move to Charlottesville.  Jen spends her day teaching English to energetic 11th grade students and she has been forced to spend her entire day trapped in the classroom with me – her co-teacher!  It’s been a blast getting to know Jen this year and I hope that I haven’t driven her crazy yet.  Jen came back to school on the Monday after Halloween with a diamond on her finger and I was honored when she asked me to do an engagement session for her and Evan.  I had briefly met Evan once before at the end of a field hockey game that Jen was coaching and it was a blast finally getting to spend some more time with him!

Jen and Evan met at the University of Mary Washington and wound up back in Jen’s hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia.  They’re getting married in October and I can’t wait to photograph their wedding!  I offered to be the ring bearer, but Jen said she’d prefer that I take the pictures.  For their engagement session, we headed back to Carter’s Mountain in November where they got engaged a few weeks earlier and we had a beautiful fall sunset!  Enjoy!

I realize that we are well into 2010 and it may be past the time to reflect on 2009, but I never got a chance to wrap up my posts on my favorite images of 2009.  With well over 12,000 clicks of the shudder (could be way more – I’m just guessing) last year, it is extremely difficult to determine which would be my favorite, especially out of my personal images.  I take a ton of pictures of my family and put many of those on facebook.  I could probably spend several weeks going through all the family photos to post my favorites from that batch, but the following two images stand out in my mind as my favorites from 2009!

You can see the original post here.  The short of the story is that in early May while we were still living in Charlotte, NC, a tornado rolled through town just north of us and this is what we saw from our front yard!  Somehow, one of the local news weathermen saw the images through Twitter and they ended up on the 11:00 news that night!

While I love these images, I hope I don’t get any more quite like this ever again.  I have no desire to be a storm chaser when I grow up!

I was listening to a podcast tonight featuring one of my favorite photographers, Zack Arias.  It was an amazing interview about balancing life and work, especially running your own business with a young family.  I definitely recommend any and all photographers out there to listen!  At any rate, listening to Zack’s interview led me to his blog which led me to an inspiring post.  He had posted an older picture he took of a famous musician.  It wasn’t his best picture photographically speaking, but he considers it his favorite because it was a career-changing photo shoot.  He went on to encourage other photographers to benchmark their photography careers…to go back and find images that marked a turn or new level reached.  So that’s what I’m doing here.

PLEASE NOTE! The following images are definitely not my best work.  After you see these, be sure to check out our website to see some of our recent work!  I think (and hope) you’ll notice a stark improvement since we first began doing this six years ago!  But, these images are important to me because they all mean something important.  It was fun digging through some old files and I think I just might have to dig deeper and see what I can find!  I hope you enjoy this at least half as much as I am!

This first image is from the very first wedding I ever shot in 2004!  I made $200 for that wedding and spent over half of that money renting a Nikon D70.  I had no idea what I was doing, and none of those images will ever appear in my portfolio again, but Adam and Charla’s wedding forever changed my life because it was that day that I realized how much I really loved photography!  They were happy with their wedding pictures, too, which gave me a little confidence boost.

Soon after my first wedding, I landed another one with some friends who heard I was shooting that first wedding.  While I was shooting that 2nd wedding, my friend Greg came up to me and said, “You shoot weddings?”  And I said, “Well, yeah!  Of course!”  I still love the two following images from Greg and Julie’s engagement shoot at Kenneth Hahn Park in Los Angeles.  I had done some engagement portraits for some friends in college, but this is what I consider to be my first real engagement portrait shoot.

I love this next picture because it proves a point.  You don’t need a big fancy camera to take decent pictures and capture special moments!  We were attending our good friend Donna’s wedding in Simi Valley, CA and I had our 4 megapixel Canon point and shoot camera with me sitting beside the aisle.  I love the expression on her dad’s face!  I used this one in my portfolio for a while until I had a few more weddings under my belt.

Tim, please don’t kill me for posting this one!  I like this one because it’s the first headshot I ever did.  Our friend Tim needed headshots for his budding acting career and I needed some portrait practice.  We set up some shots in our small L.A. apartment and again, I used this in my portfolio for quite some time!

I couldn’t find a larger version of this next one, but I had to include it.  This is from my first portrait session that I ever charged money to do.  Some friends of ours wanted some ritzy Santa Monica studio to do portraits, but thought it was too expensive.  I looked at the plain white backgrounds they were using and gawked at their price list.  I thought I could do it easily and again, we set up a studio in our apartment with a white sheet and some work lights mounted to softboxes.  I spent so much time editing these and obsessing over them that I still get a nervous twitch when I see them. 

I don’t really like looking at this next image very much, it’s rather drab.  However, it was a huge opportunity that I will never forget for many reasons!  My friend Ben landed me a gig shooting the Sony Global Division’s annual conference with all the big wigs within Sony Electronics including the C.E.O. Howard Stringer (third from the right).  My friend Kara (a stay-at-home mom photographer) and me (a teacher and wannabe photographer) put on our power suits, walked into a suite a few days before the conference and negotiated a sum of money larger than I had ever dreamed of earning in two days.  We showed up in way over our heads having never used studio lighting, improvised and learned as we went, and almost burned the place down when a piece of equipment caught fire (the fire was due to a wiring short – not our doing and it died out quickly on its own, but it was incredibly scary for a minute)!  Somehow in the end, we managed to get all the shots we were hired to get and everyone loved the product!  This job also taught me how incredibly boring corporate photography really is and confirmed that it’s not the route I want to take our business!

I love this next shot because this was my first time doing a second portrait session of the same family.  We had done portraits of Ryan and Kristin’s family when they were pregnant with their third child.  I was extremely flattered when they asked us to come to their house and take some more portraits of their family shortly after their baby was born.  This was also our last portrait session in Los Angeles before we moved to North Carolina.

We packed up and moved to Charlotte, NC and I quickly posted a bunch of ads on Craigslist just trying to get our name out there to see what would happen.  I was so excited when Kristen and Mike called soon after we moved.  After just one phone conversation, we had booked our first wedding for someone we didn’t know!  This was also the first time Sarah came with me to shoot a wedding.  She had helped me with many portrait shoots, but I had flown solo on weddings until that night.  It was a huge change in the way we worked because I gave her the camera at the reception while I took a break and she got some great candid shots!  I knew we were onto something and we worked it out for her to come with me from then on and eventually got some equipment for her so that she is now my second shooter, not just my assistant!

Recognize the dad in this next photo?  Yep, one of his other daughters got married back in Los Angeles and they flew us back to shoot the wedding.  This was the first time we traveled anywhere for photography.  It was also a great getaway because Sarah’s parents kept the kids for the weekend!  It was also the first time we ever shot a wedding in a HUGE cathedral and it was amazing.  In fact, David and Noel’s wedding is still our featured wedding on our website because it was such a great location.

This next image is from Molly and Omar’s most beautiful wedding in October 2008.  This wedding forever altered the look of our portfolio.  It was an amazing clear and perfect fall day.  Molly’s wedding was also the first time we used online proofing for ordering prints.  We haven’t looked back since!  We’ve since moved to an amazing new proofing service that our clients love (and so do we!).

Molly and Omar’s wedding was the first time we ever set up the photo booth at a reception!  We had wanted to try it for a while and they were up for it.  It was a lot of fun, but more than anything it was a huge learning experience!  We learned, most importantly, that a large roll of paper on a stand in the wind turns into a huge sail!  We found a place out of the wind to set it up and managed to capture some fun moments including this one which I love!

There are so many other images I would love to include, but it’s getting very late and I need some sleep!  This has been a fun trip down memory lane for me and I hope you enjoyed it as well.  It’s always fun to look back and see how we grow and improve.  That’s one of the reasons I love this blog!  It gives me the change to log my progress over the years.  I hope to always continue to improve.  So, now that you’ve seen where we’ve come from over the past six years, be sure to check out where we are now over at our portfolio site if you haven’t checked it out in a while!  Thanks for strolling with me!