I was so excited to find out that one of my pictures from California was featured in the latest Modern Bride magazine.

It’s the lower image on the left side below.  The article is on the 50 best places to honeymoon, and my pictures represents California!  (Which should be higher than #18, if you ask me.)

If you’d like to take a look at the actual print version, it’s the Aug/Sept 2009 issue.  The cover is below.  The image is on page 315.  I do not get a credit because the image royalties were purchased through Getty Images, a stock photography company. ETA:  I did get a credit!  But it’s stuck in the gutter between the pages and I didn’t see it right away.  I’m famous!

I’ve had some success with stock photography, but this is the first time it’s been somewhere so high profile.  Usually, my images are used on websites or in brochures, as far as I know.

Scroll down for two other blog posts from earlier today- I’m trying to catch up on blog negligence.

Last summer, I did portraits of author Barbara Cooke, to go on a dust jacket for a book she wrote, but she asked me to hold posting about the photos until the book came out this fall.

The Parent’s Practical Guide to Colleges and Careers: How to Help, Not Hover, by Barbara Cooke, is now available and I am very excited for her!  You can take a look at the book and order it from this website: http://www.theparentspracticalguide.com/

You can see the dust jacket photo in all its glory on this page.

Or you can see them below.  We did several poses in several different locations.  Some were outside, some were inside.

Barbara is the lead counselor at Metropolitan Community College- Maple Woods, in Kansas City, Missouri.  She is also a regular contributor to the business section of the Kansas City Star.

I was part of the Inside Columbia magazine’s 080808 Photo Essay, which was printed in the September 2008 issue that just came out.  The idea was to capture ‘one moment’ in time, on August 8, 2008, at 8:08am.

Here is the shot that I submitted and which was included.  I didn’t really have an idea of what I wanted to capture that day for submission, and then I was running late.  I wasn’t going to have enough time to really scope out a good spot, so I just started driving towards work and hoped that something would happen.  And of course it did!  I pass this row of trees outside the Katy Apartments on Forum Boulevard every day, and I never noticed the sprinklers before.  But that morning, the sun backlit the spray and it looked really beautiful.  I made up my mind in an instant and pulled into the lot.

I have also been working on some of the photos that I took way back in April on my fantastic trip to San Francisco and other areas of Northern California.  I have not had a lot of time to work on these in the past few months, but I have every intention of finishing them someday!  Here are some of the breathtaking vistas along the Pacific Coast Highway in Big Sur.  Some of this area was devastated this summer by wildfires.

This last shot was in San Gregorio, California, rather than in Big Sur.

One of my dream houses is small and midcentury modern, with lots of windows and bookshelves, on a craggy cliff in Big Sur, overlooking the Pacific.  I live in it in my head.

A couple of months ago, I was interviewed for an article about Flickr, the photo-sharing site.  The article went live online this evening and will appear in the Saturday, 7 June 2008 edition of the Columbia Missourian newspaper.

Strangely, the online version is linking my name to this website rather than my Flickr site, so in case you are a visitor from the paper (hello!), my Flickr page is here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/aabbbiee/

I am a fairly active member of Flickr, especially as far as the local community goes, and I really love the site.  However, I think the reason I’m included in the article is that I got in somehow with one of the journalism professors at the University of Missouri (which publishes the Columbia Missourian).  This is my second time in the Saturday Missourian in less than a year, both photo-related stories.  Not that I mind, obviously!  I love it!

In other news:

I received confirmation today that I will be involved with the July rotation in the community artist program at the Columbia Art League.  This means that I will have a display of photos up for a few months at a bank or church somewhere in the area.  I guess that could properly be called an ‘exhibition’, but I am not too worried about labels.  I am just thrilled to prepare and hang some of my pictures, and maybe have some people walk by them on a semi-regular basis.  Still no word on where they will be located, exactly, but I will not keep it a secret once I hear back.

I am hard at work on photos from my sessions last week and will certainly have something to show by the end of the weekend.  I’ll leave a couple of peeks here just to entice you to return to see the results.