Kendra Pence Photography

Have you ever just had one of those feel sorry for yourself days!!!   I have a cast on my right arm and it is making me see just how much I love my job and how sad I am when I am unable to do it.  I tried to do some editing today with my left hand only!  I wasn't very successful!  I guess it's OK to have one of those days, I'm making a promise to myself that tomorrow will be better and that smile will be back on my face!!!

Several of you have asked about the cast.  I wish I could say I fell on our family's ski trip last weekend!  Unfortunately, I have Rheumatoid Arthritis, I've had it for 11 years.  Most days are good, but every day brings pain.  I try to never let it get me down, even on the days that I feel crummy! I try to always have the attitude that it's nothing that I can't handle.  Over the last several months, the pain in my wrist has gotten more severe, so I  broke down and went to the doctor.  After doing some x-rays, my doctors saw  deterioration in my wrist, so he thought maybe we could calm it down a bit if they immobilize me!  Terrific...I don't do immobilization well, immobilization makes me grouchy :)  Anyway, another week and a half of this darn cast and then we come up with another plan of attack.  I told my doctors that I plan to be just as active when I'm 80 as I am at age 37, so I'll do what they tell me to do to get better and slow down the disease! 

In the meantime, I'm going to make the best of these next few days of immobilization, today was my last day of feeling sorry for myself and letting the fear of the future creep into my mind!  I've got way too much to be thanful for!!!

All of this immobilization has goofed up my website plans.  I still hope to have it up and running in the next couple of days, but nothing seems to be going as planned!  We have to get our new blog design completed, then we'll launch it all at once.  Kris worked on it all day today, its looking awesome and I can't wait for you to see it!!!

Here are a few images I was actually able to work on today!  We've had so many cutie patooties in here lately!!!  Click on the link below to view a video I did of little miss Cameron.  Even on the gloomiest day, I can do nothing but smile as I watch her and think back to her session!

http://video214.com/play/zGYDg7ApSB3L0bF5pctyfw/s/dark

Here are a few more images too, enjoy!!!

Just a few cutie patooties from recent sessions.  I'm on my way out the door to go meet with some other area photographers to do some learrning, but wanted to make a quick post first!  Enjoy!

It's senior time of year again!  The phone is ringing like crazy around here so give us a call asap to get your 2011 senior sessions booked!  Below are a few images that will be on our new website, I can't wait to fianlly have that website up and running.  Hopefully only two more days!!!

 

And seeing all thses tank tops makes me so ready for spring!!  Bring on the warm weather!!!

Send us those questions!!!

It's time to start flooding my inbox with questions!  Everyone has nice cameras these days, but how tough is it to figure out how to use it.  Not everyone wants to be a professional, many of you just want to learn how to take better pictures of your kiddos, your pets, or even your cakes!  I'd love to try and help you with that!  Email your camera questions to kpence@kendrapence.com! We will answer a few at a time one day a week, hopefully I can help you out! BTW, have any of you stopped into Bella on Neil St. It's an awesome local boutique.  If I was looking for some cool clothing for my child's photo session, that would be my first stop.  I love the new Tea clothing line in the children's section, very cute and very affordable for a boutique line.  They also have added a resale section in the upstairs area where I've seen some very cute stuff!  Check out their website at www.bellamiaboutique.com. Speaking of my favorite things, you have to check out www.tokentags.com and www.thevintagepearl.com.  For those of you who know me well, I'm not much of a jewelry girl. I'm actually a bit of a tomboy, so it's not often that I get really excited about a piece of jewelry. Anyway, two very dear friends of mine were wearing token tag necklaces and I fell in love immediately because they were personalized with the names of their kiddos.  I knew that would be a piece of jewelry that I would never take off, so I told my hubby that was all I wanted for Christmas.  Considering I never give him any gift ideas, I was a little disappointed that my token tag box wasn't waiting under the Christmas tree for me.  A couple weeks later though, my dear friend Julie gave me the exact necklace I fell in love with ( Todd was in on her plan all along).  I have not taken that necklace off since I unwrapped it, my kiddos are always close to my heart!  Thanks Julie and Kim, I love you girls!  The vintage pearl is a similar website I found a few weeks ago. I am anxiously awaiting a similar necklace from them that I purchased for my mom for her birthday.    If you have any favorite things that I can include on my blog, please email me.  I plan to do a "my favorite things" post once a week. Sometimes they'll be photography related items and sometimes just fun personal things we like or things our clients like! Ok, the website is about done, how come those things don't ever go as smoothly as we'd like. I can't even describe how many hours have gone into getting this site ready, I hope you love the website and our new KPP look as much as we do!    Ok,  I'm off to bed. I'll post some fun new images tomorrow and a new educational post is coming soon.   I hope there are no typos in here, that is definitely one of my biggest pet peeves. If there are, I have a really good excuse. I have a situation that if you see me in the next couple of weeks, you will totally understand my issue. More info on that later :)

Check out the difference!

I get a lot of questions about just what goes into the business of photography, and how we get our pictures to look like they do.   I'm SO excited about some new things we have coming up (which is why I can't sleep and have been working since 7 this morning).  Very soon, you'll see an all new Kendra Pence Photography look, including a new website and blog.  We've worked long, countless hours on the new website and blog and have so many ideas of things we want to do daily on the blog.  One thing I plan to do is have one day of the week where we do questions and answers regarding your cameras and photography in general.   Tons of people have great cameras these days, I see lots of people running around with the Canon Rebel, but do you really know how to use it?  It's a great consumer camera and I'll try to answer questions you have.   Another designated day of the week, I plan to show you some before and afters and explain just what we do in all the different programs we use to create our own unique look.  I giggled one day as I looked at a post on facebook talking about, "those images are amazing and just jump off the page with their vivid colors, how does she do that."  Another person responded, "actually, I can do the same thing on my phone, all she does is press the vibrant button."  I laughed...if only it were that easy! We've created tons of our own "recipes" over the last few years.  I strongly believe that it is very, very important to be technically correct in the camera, but it is just as important to be able to enhance those images through different professional editing programs on the computer.  You can't truly be a professional with a deep knowledge of both.  I hope when you look at an image produced by KPP, you know instantly that it is one of ours and you know that we've used the proper professional equipment and have spent the time required to make it a beautiful piece of artwork!

My son Ty is my first set of examples.  I was dragging out images for the new website and ran across this picture.  I'll show you some of the different options I created using the same image throughout.  Keep in mind, it took me over an hour to do all the different options, so it's far from pressing a "vibrant" button.

This first image is the original image right out of the camera.  Cameras are good, but they aren't good enough to bring out a fully edited image.  I believe that anyone can take a good image, but how many can make it a beautiful image.  See what you think! 

This next image has been edited with our basic edit and then I cropped it just a little bit.

On this one, I took our basic edit and added another layer for a little bit different look. 

I took the this one step further.  It's a small difference, but still adds another dimension to the image.

This is the same image with one more layer and a vintage finish to it.  It took me months to get a vintage look that I loved, tons and tons of trial and error.  I love vintage now and our clients are loving it too!

This is our recipe for black and white.  We love a very, very vivid black and white.  Trust me, it's not just removing all the saturation out of the image, it's a very long recipe to get this look that we prefer.

This is our browntone, again, about 22 steps to create this look!

Isn't it amazing what the combination of highly powered, very complex professional editing programs can do to enhance images.  I've been working with photoshop for 5 years now and it's the most overwhelming program I've ever used in my entire life.  I can honestly say that I still learn something new every day!!!

What the heck, it's only 12:45am, I might as well show you one more.  This is Stella, I loved Stella!  She was a fun, very cooperative little lady.  I played a bit with her images to show you a few more things!

This image is straight out of the camera.  Beautiful girl, but the image is pretty blah!

This is a little more basic editing.  We pay attention to the details when we photograph and then make small adjustments when we edit to make sure all our colors our true.  That is perhaps one of the hardest things to get right on a consistent basis because there are so many factors that play into every single shot you take.  Do you ever see images that look way too yellow or blue or the skin tones are wrong, it's a common problem and a very difficult one to get right on a consistent basis.

  

This is the same image with a few fun things added.  The exact same image :)

 

This next one is our vintage look.  Love it!!!  Did I mention that I think this little girl is gorgeous!

The last step is our unique black and white!

Ok, I hope you notice the difference and enjoy this post.  More to come, keep checking back.  Hopefully the website will be up in 2-3 days with the blog following closely behind!  You're going to love it, I promise!!!