2011: The year that Sue and I bought a house! It’s a great feeling, but one of the drawbacks of setting up our new home and office, and having full-time day jobs, is that we did very little photographing. And the money we were going to use to finally buy the beefy lenses and new camera bodies that we so desperately need…well, let’s just say we really love our new washer and dryer! But we did get out there a few times.

And just this morning I got an email from my good friend Annie about photographer Jim Godlstein’s 2011 Blog Project. It’s a great idea: He invites photogs from all over to post their best shots of the previous year on their blog, and then he posts links to all of them on his. What a nice thing to do. And because 2012 is the year we are going to start seriously marketing our work, the timing is great. We’d love for you all to like our new Facebook Fan Page!

So here, in somewhat chronological order, is a bit of the beauty and weirdness that Sue and I saw through our lenses last year…

It’s All Hallows Eve! Let these graves serve as a reminder that the dead are never far away…

Graveyards and cemeteries we’ve wandered through in Oregon and Massachusetts.

Wow, has it really been six months since we last posted? That’s also how long it’s been since Sue and I have gone out shooting. Wah. But it’s all been worth it, because we went and bought ourselves a house! Our lives are finally getting back to normal (it’s been laborious to say the least), and our super duper new photography office is nearly set up, so let the artwork commence!

Soon. We got a few more things to do, and our day jobs are keeping us extra busy. At least I get A.C. and a comfy seat, Sue’s stuck weeding a giant weedy field in the scorching sun all week.  Here’s a pic to help cool her off…

We’ve finally added most of our Ashland images to the galleries! Well, some of them. There are thousands more to sort through, but alas, we must put the breaks on building the site for a few months as we prepare to move house to a sunny new spot in our town. Below is an image of Jay’s from Ashland’s 100-acre oasis, Lithia Park. (You won’t find it there, though, it will be included in our Nature Closeups gallery, coming later this year.) So take a little trip through one of the American West’s most picturesque little towns!

More like frozen fog, really. During the last couple of nights the Rogue Valley has been blanketed with cold, thick fog, and the footprint it leaves on everything it touches is a magical thing to see.  White, spiky frost covers every twig, park bench and blade of grass. Jay and I were fortunate to have it linger long enough into the day so that we could do some lunch break photographing.  These are a few shots taken at the North Mountain Park Nature Center here in Ashland.

Thought we got clouded out for 2010′s winter solstice lunar eclipse…and we pretty much did. But I did get a couple of shots from the backyard when the clouds opened. I wasn’t able to get anything super sharp, so I played with the zoom. Next eclipse we will have better lenses!

We’re vendors of the day today at the Ashland Artisans Emporium! Someone bought a few matted prints from our booth yesterday. Thanks!

Sue and I were going to shoot today, try to capture some of this weather. But it’s nasty. And cold. And we have sooooo many hundreds of pictures to go through and get up here in galleries. So we are home in the studio, finishing up our Ashland Events galleries (hopefully). Then onto the Lithia Park  pics.

In the mean time, here are a few shots of Ashland’s Ice Cream Social that I worked on this morning…

Sue and I ventured to downtown Ashland to shoot the annual holiday Festival of Light celebration. Here’s a brief write-up (to entice any of you magazine editors out there) along with a few of our shots from that glorious November afternoon.

ASHLAND FESTIVAL OF LIGHT — The end of fall greets the coming of winter in the picturesque hamlet of Ashland, Oregon. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, the townsfolk usher in the holidays with live music on the Plaza and ice skating in Lithia Park. Once the sun goes down, hundreds of revelers gather along Main Street to watch a short parade featuring dancing Christmas Trees and concluding with Santa Claus himself. After reaching the Plaza, he heads up to the balcony of Alex’s restaurant and then counts down from 10. And then, more than a million Christmas lights pop on like popcorn all over downtown! It’s truly is a sight to behold. Very Norman Rockwell.

Woo hoo! We finally have some of our work out there in the third dimension! The brand new Ashland Artisan Emporium has just opened up. Dozens of booths of everything from antiques to paintings to baby clothes to hats to jewelry to our pics and Sue’s funky Oddmollusk creature sculpture thingies! It’s like a really artistic flea market. Very Ashland. Sue and I are so honored to here at the beginning … and to finally get our three-year-old gallery pics out of storage and on to a real live wall!

The booth is only two days old and we’ve already sold seven greeting cards! Come by if you live in town. There’s a grand opening on Saturday, November 20th.  It’s in the Ashland Shopping Center on Highway 66 next to the cinema.

This is a big step for us to finally start selling our stuff again. As Tobias Funke would yell, “Let the great experiment begin!”

Building this site has been very slow going…thanks to work, life, some great new fall shows. Also, we’ve been waiting for three months for Photocrati’s new big amazing upgrade to really start putting the site together, and since it finally came out last week, it’s been quite buggy. So we remain patient and keep shooting and working on processing our images for the web.

In the meantime, our recent waterfall kick has entered autumn. Here is Sue and I at our latest discovery, Mossbrae Falls in Dunsmuir, California. Springs from the hillside keep these Hawaii-like falls flowing all year long.