Here in Atlanta, Catherine and I wait all year for fall to arrive. With the hot, humid sizzle of the Georgia summer finally falling away, our favorite time of the year has finally arrived!

This weekend brought the first real changes in the fall color, surely Autumn is here! With the change of weather, comes the anticipation of crisp cool nights, the smell of a campfire, and yummy gooey s'mores, candied apples, high school football games, fall festivals, and other highlights of the season. Here are a few pictures from the past couple of weeks. Enjoy the season with us!

Catherine's girl scout troop took a trip to the corn maize. This is a working dairy farm that does a massive corn maize every year. The girls had a blast getting lost in the corn maize (the sign that says this way out, doesn't really get you out!) and checking out the pumpkin patch!





YES! The leaves are finally turning! This is one of my favorite parts of fall! The color only lasts a little while, but I think this year it will be one of the best for color in the last handful of years.




Football, marching band, and spending crisp cool Friday nights on cold metal bleachers! This was our high school's homecoming weekend, and they were all ready! The football team won by a landslide 49 to 13, and the marching band was not getting a break from playing the school fight song after every touchdown!




We found these yummy candied apples at a local arts festival today! They were covered with chocolate and caramel and were stuck on REAL sticks!



A couple of weeks ago, our youngest daughter and I went father-daughter girl scout camping. We had a blast camping, cooking, doing leathercraft, silkscreening by hand, and other camp activities. The preferred mode of transportation around the 1000 acre camp is by bicycle, which was just fine by my daughter. UNFORTUNATELY, there was not enough room in the truck for my bicycle, so I was hoofing it. We went many miles down the mountain trails, which my daughter just loved, but my feet didn't!

Ah, the smell of the wood burning and crackling on the fire! I can sit for hours around a warm fire, especially when the temperature is clipping the upper 30's like it was our first night there. Of course all the girls were making yummy, gooey s'mores, and we had more than our share! But trying to get a picture of a s'more is impossible, they get gobbled up before I can even get the camera to focus!

Mike and I invested in Showit Web and LOVE it. Here's my first slideshow featuring pictures from the other evening playing with the kids. Enjoy!!!
Now off to work on our website...

An Autumn Sunday evening had the neighborhood kids playing tag in the front yards... what a wonderful, carefree time they were having. So, Mike and I took the time to watch the kids through our lenses.

It was fun to just enjoy the laughter and share our love of images with another generation. Our youngest, Emma, even got a chance to take some pictures! These pictures feature our good friend and her three daughters.

Here are some of my favorites.

Wednesday night I attended the monthly meeting of the Atlanta Pictage Users Group (PUG) with about 20 other area photographers. Catherine and I are currently researching ordering, printing, and album options, so Pictage is definitely on our list as a possible solution for order fulfillment. We had some great munchies, including some delicious spice cupcakes, and generally had a blast networking with other local wedding photographers at the meeting and at dinner afterwards.

The highlight of the meeting was a presentation on the business of photography by the extremely talented and business savvy Liana Lehman of Liana Photography. Liana is an award winning photographer and instructor, and her presentation of business requirements and facts were "eye popping" to say the least! Her discussions, touching on areas of planning, budgeting, marketing, pricing, accounting, and ongoing analysis, show just how many things have to click in order to run a successful photography business. I would like to thank Liana for presenting this extremely important information to the group!

So if I wash all this down to my perspective, there is a lot of hard, time consuming, and often unnoticed work that occurs to produce a quality finished product for the customer. As a professional photographer, I want to know that I am doing all that I can to run my business in a cost effective and successful manner. As a customer, you want to know that the photographer or studio that you select to capture your life's most precious moments will still be in business down the road when you are ready to capture that next timeless moment. As consumers, we all know there are many ways to "cut corners" in today's photographic market, especially with the advent of digital technology. But will you get that special moment preserved in its most beautiful way, destined to be an heirloom for your children or your children's children? Support your chosen photographer, you will be glad you did!

Last week, we attended a gathering of local Atlanta and southeastern area photographers hosted by the awesome team of Andrew and Rachel Niesen and Mark and Erin Adams of LaCour Studios . With help from the fantastic teams of Amber and Nathan Holritz and Joy and Garrett Nudd , the evening was highlighted with great food, much fun, discussion, and networking opportunities. As explained by Andrew, their goal is not only to build community with their clients, but also to build community with the photographers in the local market. With the rapid and changing nature of photography, a closely knit community of professionals sharing ideas, successes, failures, and experiences strengthens our abilities as professional photographers to offer better products and services to our customers.

Photography by Mike and Catherine is proud to be a part of this growing community and would like to thank Andrew, Rachel, Mark, and Erin for including us in this opportunity. We met many fine photographers from our area and look forward to being contributors to continuing to build this community of outstanding professionals.

Well, Mike is off camping with our youngest this weekend and the boys had other plans, I actually had a free evening and was bored with my "to do" list. I borrowed Mike's 5D and took some shots of my best friend and her twin daughters playing in our front yard.

I have spent the last few hours playing with Creative Memories' Memory Manager software, cropping and editing some of the better ones. Here are my favorites, enjoy!

Someone asked about our logo and the story behind it. Well here's my version (Mike's may be different!)...

The leaf is 'colored' with a photograph of fall leaves as Mike and I met in the fall and have always loved that time of the year. Our first dates were outside, hiking and camping and the leaves remind me of those first weeks as we discovered each other!

When we were thinking about doing something creative "falling leaves" just needed to be incorporated somewhere so this is what I came up with for us.

I am so excited about a new product! (not new to the photographic community, but new to Creative Memories) They have introduced StoryBooks, created with free software and printed by CM's photo center. I received the one Mike and I made to showcase the product and some of our favorite photographs, the quality is fantastic and I am sold. I can't wait to show it off to my customers!

Here's a peek inside! (for more detail - see my blog at www.shabbycatz.blogspot.com)

"Honey, get up. Its 5:30 and the sun is rising, I thought you wanted to do some practice sessions while we were here?" So with one eye propped open, and no coffee, my wife Catherine (ShabbyCat) pushes me out of bed and we head down to the beach with our 8yr old daughter for the sunrise and a practice e-session type shoot. Striving for an all natural light session with no help from flash or reflectors, these are the results of our fun morning at the beach! Hope you enjoy!

Mike's a hard act to follow but an easy one to encourage, support and love. He has been a blessing to me since we met 10 years ago.

I am an artist at heart and have always dabbled in way too much. Blame my mom, she NEVER said don't try it, but pushed me to master what ever I chose to try. My resume is quite interesting to read because I have so been so many things in the last 20+ years, among the favorites and the ones I draw on most are costume designer, stage manager, graphic artist, sales clerk, cake decorator and teacher.

The last 7 years I have worked as a lactation consultant helping mothers learn to nurture their babies and I work with clients as often as I can. I love seeing the interaction between the mother and newborn and have recently begun to photograph them.

A year ago I had a life changing medical crisis that made me realize that our family needed to be my first priority. I had to do something different, to go back to my art roots, work for myself and help Mike realize his dream. (he supported, encouraged and did all he could for me when I was working to become a lactation consultant and while I worked for the practice, being on call 24/7 and working odd hours)

So here we are a year later, I am a consultant for Creative Memories using my talents to showcase my 'snapshots' and family stories and Mike's "Pro Pictures" (some of mine too) using CM's tools and albums! (I also teach my friends & customers to do the same) Mike is pursuing the dream to return to photography and I have even started to pick up the camera more and more! (ask him about calling me "Uncle Bob")

I hope you enjoy the ride with us!

>^. .^<
ShabbyCat

Well, where to start? I have been involved in photography in some form or another for 35 years. Originally, I had this grandios idea to try astrophotography so I talked my parents into getting me a 35mm camera for my 15th Birthday. Of course, as teenagers are, I never got the telescope to go with it, but instead delved into the world of developing my own black and white pictures. To see images form on a piece of plastic film and then enlarged into a printed picture was absolute magic to me!

It was during these years that I began shooting rock concerts, from the edge of my seat, or someone elses, or occasionally from the shoulders of a stranger! I loved the high energy, trying to capture these energized stage moments on film. Then, one day, the promoters decided that cameras were no longer welcome to concerts, sporting events, and the like. By this time, I was now in college, working towards a computer engineering degree, and photography began to take a backseat. I had found software development and loved it! A new, exciting, and different creative outlet - I was on the forefront of the emerging technology of microcomputers, the PC, and home computing.

This has captivated my career now for 26 years, paid the bills, and kept my creativity alive. But photography was always there. A thousand rolls of film or more have buzzed through my cameras over the years, capturing lifes moments of my family, our 5 children, vacations, and countless other subjects. Today, my film days have mostly been replaced with the digital camera, zipping through more pictures than I ever dreamed possible!

But over the past few years, a growing, nagging, feeling that I should have done more than "snap shots" over the past years has been in the forefront of my mind. After much contemplation and prayer, I feel now that the good Lord has been trying to direct me down a path that for many years I pushed aside. Today I am following that path, not knowing where its going, or where it may lead.

Along with my wife Catherine, whose constant encourgement and creative abilities keep me moving day to day, I am finally ready to rock'n'roll this photography idea! Are you ready to rock'n'roll with us? We hope so! We hope you will follow along as we move forward with our photographic endeavors, and as we rewind to some moments of the past for your (and our) enjoyment! And please, dont be bashful, leave us a comment and let us know what you think!

Blessings!!!
Mike

Welome to the home of Photography by Mike and Catherine Warren. We are just testing our blog and should be up and running shortly. Thanks for stopping by, hope to see you soon!