I finally feel comfortable posting a preview of our new website. This has been my winter project (read: obsession) and I’m really hoping to have it up very soon – even though I keep saying that.

[warning, the following is geek-speak]
While I could have gone for a out-of-the-box flash designed site like every other photographer’s, I decided to make it Flash-esque with Javascript transitions between pages. The cool thing about this (to geeks like me, at least) is that even if you don’t have Javascript in your web browser, the page will still work correctly (without the “pretty” transitions).

Included with the new site design is a completely revamped Blog template AND the blog will be living on barberphotostudio.com, not Blogger.

So, when you come back sometime to see things looking different, you won’t think you are at the wrong place!

– Kevin

Kindra and I are both sporting our “Save Ashlyn” shirts today. You may remember Ashlyn’s senior portraits we posted last summer.

Late in the summer Ashlyn found out she had leukemia and has been going through chemo for the past few months and is now in remission.

Today Ashlyn is having a bone marrow transplant from her sister, Hayley (what a hero of a sister!) We are wearing our “Save Ashlyn” t-shirts in support; what’s really cool is that there is a Facebook group that Ashlyn’s family started to gather photographs of everyone wearing their “Save Ashlyn” shirts.

T-Shirts were designed and printed by Smash in Des Moines and I understand that they donated the graphic for the family to use. (Of course, its a spoof of the famous water tower in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.)

Update (1/23 3:30 pm – via Facebook): Danny says the transplant is complete. All went well with Ashlyn. Hayley had a pretty rough go but is slowly getting better. Hayley is a HERO!

I just had to share this video I found from another blog of a time-lapse scene. One thing I thought was really interesting about this is that each image is a HDR image (I’ve blogged about HDR many times in the past, so I won’t put up a link right now).

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

Visit the original at Eirik Solheim’s blog for more information and a few other videos.

I came across the [news] Photos of the Year, 2008 from the Des Moines Register. There are 91 photos, so it takes a while to go through them all, but is totally worth it. I don’t believe they are in any particular order.

My favorites are 38, 42, 44, 45, 74, 76, and 80. What are yours?

I thought I’d write about a couple projects I’ve been working on lately – since I haven’t had a whole lot of new stuff coming up onto the blog lately.

First, we had several events that we photographed in the past month – the Valley Church Thanksgiving baby dedication was on November 9th. We enjoy serving our church with providing photography for the dedications because we know how difficult it can be to take good photographs during a church service like this. In addition to candid portraits during the dedication, we also setup our lights and background for some formal portraits after each service.

The Saturday following the dedication, we photographed the EMC Insurance company’s holiday party where we created portraits for over 70 individuals, couples, and groups! We were able to have a really nice setup there – Lots of room at HyVee Hall… here’s a look at what our setup looked like.

We were able to show our new gallery wrap canvas from the Olesen’s on-location sesssion at the Omaha Zoo in June and some of our other favorite products. We got a lot of positive comments on our guestbook engagement album and memory book.

In addition to the sorting, editing, e-mailing, and ordering with those events, I still managed to do some record-breaking (in terms of time to complete) web design for Valley Church’s upcoming Christmas with Friends event. I was able to try out a few things I’ve been wanting to try for a while with web design. The site features a photo gallery of last year’s event (guess whose photos I used), Music from the CD, Scenes of Christmas, that Valley produced a year or two ago, and an e-mail invitation feature.

Speaking of Christmas With Friends, if you have the chance, I do highly recommend attending. It is a great way to get into the mood for Christmas (the holiday, not the shopping experience)… and its free!

While the snowflakes were falling last week, we also managed to squeeze in a really fun engagement photography session (a blog post about that is upcoming) on-location in West Des Moines with some really fun locations like Valley Junction.

After my satisfaction with the church website, I had sufficient motivation to finally start coding the new Barber Photography website. Here’s a sneak peek at what will be coming out in the relatively near future. I still have quite a bit of work to do on it, so all you get at this point is a picture of what it’ll (hopefully) look like

As you can see, we’ll be adding our new logo (designed by our good friend, Heather Haxton) to the site and I’m hoping to be incorportating the blog into the site as well, to have a consitant look and feel between the blog and website.

OK, I’m putting myself back to work now!