{The blog has moved!}

My new blog is now at http://www.toripiercyphotography.com/blog

I am so excited about the move and hope everyone likes it 🙂

{Baby Nate}

Before I get to this precious little boy, I want to thank all of you that have sent so many comforting thoughts and said prayers for my family.  It has meant the world to us!  When things like this happen it really puts everything into perspective about what is truely important in life 🙂  We are all doing ok, although sleeping at night has been a little tough.  But that will get better with time!  We just feel so incredibly blessed and lucky.

Ok now onto this beautiful baby boy!  He is just a doll!  I have been super itchy to shoot a newborn and have been buying stuff for months just waiting for one to come my way.  Poor Rob and Stephanie- I think it took two of us 3 trips to bring all of it into their home.  It was so much fun though and Nate was such a good baby!  And for first time parents Rob and Stephanie were so good with him.

I am going to be doing my sneak peeks a little different from now on.  I am going to be sharing 2 or 3 pictures for a peek and then when I get them all edited I will post more from the session I will make a longer post followed by a slideshow at the end to really showcase their shoot.

Without further ado, here is baby Nate!

I told you he was beautiful!  Isn’t this making your ovaries ache?  I love how his little piggies are poking through the wrap 🙂

And here is such a special moment with Rob and Nate.  I adore this of you two!

Thank you so much Rob and Stephanie for letting me come over and spend the morning with your family.  I am so excited to show the rest to ya’ll!

{Fire Choas}

At 2 a.m. this morning my husband and I woke up to crazy, frantic knocking on our door.  Groggily rushing down the hallway, I thought to myself Do I really want to open this door?  What if this is some crazy seriel killer trying to get in our home?  A couple seconds later my husband rushed past me and started screaming, “Oh my God!  The RV  is on fire!”.  I looked out the kitchen window from the hallway and saw red and orange flames coming from outside.  I felt like we were in a crappy movie.  This couldn’t possibly be happening. 

The person was still knocking crazy on our door. I opened it and saw my neighbor screaming, “Your house is on fire!  Your house is on fire!”  as she was on the phone with 911.  I don’t even know if I acknowledged her.  My mind started to rush and I immediately ran to get the kids out of bed and tossed them out the front door.  Bless their hearts, they had no clue what was going on and they were so quiet.  My husband had ran outside to try to turn on the hose bib but burned his hand and cut his finger.  We quickly tried to round up our two dogs, but could only find Lucy.  David went off to find Charlie.  I ran inside to grab my hardrive.  Getting that darn thing unplugged seemed like an eternity.  Whoever made the monitor plug with the spin screws obviously didn’t take emergencies into account.  The fire started to really roar and I could hear some explosions.  I always thought I had a pretty good plan of grabbing valuables in case of a quick emergency but it all went to the way side.  It was scary enough just trying to rescue the hardrive.  We never found Charlie.

As I headed out the door, flames were coming up and over the house and fire embers where floating everywhere.  There my family stood in the cold of night, no jackets, no socks.  Just watching, knowing our home was about to burn to the ground.  I stood out there with the kids, so grateful we all made it out alive and ok.  Then it started to hit me of all the things that meant so much to me that were still inside.  I didn’t think to grab my other computer’s hardrive, the external hardrive, printed pictures that could never be replaced.  My children’s very favorite toys and beloved blankets.  My D700.  Special clothing the kids wore.  Our wedding rings.  Heart wrenching just doesn’t even cover it.

My neighbor noticed how cold the kids and I were and asked if we wanted to go to their home.  The kids definitely needed to get somewhere warm.  While we headed over I could hear the fire trucks coming.  The next 4 hours we spent at their house.  My husband came over and told us the news. 

The house was just fine. 

And Charlie, the massive 140 pound lab, was curled up in our bedroom shaking.

The RV was not.  It sat in a pile of rubble with nothing but a frame to show for itself.  After several hours of investigating it was determined the fire started around the battery area that’s located right under the stairs.

Here’s a shot to show you how close the RV sat to the house

The front of the RV where the 5th wheel part is

The back of the RV.  Sitting about a foot behind it is our boat which amazingly was untouched.

The fence got charred but I am amazed it is even still there.  Look at how close the fence was to the RV!  The wind was blowing towards the house which helped

The master bedroom bed frame

The microwave

Here’s the outside of our house.  How we still have a house is nothing short of a miracle. 

You can’t really tell too much in this picture but this window cracked in several different places

The siding melted all over the plants

The porch siding

We feel so incredibly blessed and thankful our home is ok!  The flames were so big and were blowing all over the top of our house.  God definitely looked over us last night.  Thank you for all of your good thoughts and prayers.  It is all appreciated so much!  The kids seem to be handling everything ok.  Although little David has said, “The RV is hurt” and “The RV burned” many many times today.  Peyton had her 3 year old fire story so this must be his (please God, Katie doesn’t need her own thank you).  David and I are much more fragile about it.  It has been tough to write this and really get all of this sorted.  Those sights, smells, sounds, crazy thoughts will be things I will never forget. 

But I feel so incredibly blessed

{Ben and Bella}

You might recognize these cuties from the gorgeous family I shot in Apalachicola.  During the day of that shoot, poor Ben was sick and was not in a picture taking mood.  We did a mini shoot of Ben and Bella to get some shots of them together to complete their family’s big shoot.  Between Christmas and our nasty cold streak we had in the first half of January, it is just now decent enough to take outdoor pictures so everyone won’t be miserable.  Of course on the day we picked it had to get all cloudy and started sprinkling right before we met up.  But we got some really cute shots of them together!  Misson accomplished 🙂

This picture makes my heart melt!

Bella wanted nothing to do with Ben and everytime he tried to hug her, we got these looks from her.  How funny is this?!?  I love the little devislish grin Ben has on his face right there too.  It reminds me of my own kids 🙂

And here’s another one of them together

It was great spending more time with your family and I am excited to share the others 🙂

{Warmer Winter Day}

It has been so darn cold here in Florida!  We finally got a break from the weather with a day that reached almost 70 degrees 🙂  So we headed out to play!

This is one of my favorite pictures I have taken so far.  I just love this of my two girls!  I am thinking of getting this printed big on a canvas 😀

Katie didn’t want much of the camera, just wanted to play 🙂  Besides the picture above, this was the only picture I got of her looking at me

Check out that pouty face!

Here’s a snapshot of David 🙂  Can you tell he dressed himself???

Peyton really likes posing for me and I love that she does 🙂  It gives her confidence too which I love seeing.  She has always been a huge tomboy so it’s fun to see her emerge out of it a little bit.  I don’t know if she’ll ever be a girly girl, but either way I love her just the same!

{Multi-tasking}

This week has been so darn cold!  And it has made me super itchy because I haven’t been able to get out and play around with my new camera.  Plus I have been sick and I have no business out in that coldness.  So I decided to lug out my backdrop stand that has seen way more of a closet than I’ll ever care to admit.  The bad news is the only back drop I have at the moment is white and I am not a huge fan of or interested in doing high key photography at all.  But what the heck, it was better than nothing right?!?

So I grab Katie and get her dressed in her clothes.  Then, take about 5 minutes to do her hair.  She has that super fine, soft hair that is really hard to work with.  I turned on the TV for her and went to set up the stand.  I get it all set up, come out only to see her sitting in a chair with both pony tails pulled out and the head band thrown on the floor.  And I can’t find the hair bands I put in.  I don’t know about your house,  but at ours we loose those hair bands like none other!  And to find a matching pair is next to impossible! 

Just at that moment the phone rings and it was a friend I hadn’t talked to in awhile.  While we were talking I decided to “multi-task”  (using that term very loosely here) to find a set of matching hair bands, preferably brown or white.  So I am going from room to room with her feather headband in one hand while gabbing away on the phone.  My friend and I talked for a good while and I had finally found a set of matching white bands!  We get off the phone and I suddenly realize I have no earthly clue what I did with her darn headband *smacks head* 

I spend the next 20 minutes trying to find her headband.  So much for multi-tasking 😛

But I did manage to get some pictures I adore of Katie so it was all worth it to me.  Even better, the light in my kitchen made the paper more of a bone color which was a better improvement over the white 🙂   Isn’t her sweater vest adorable?  My friend Holly from Handmadebymama made it.  She has pants that match the vest too

{Happy New Year!}

Wow!  2010.  I don’t know about you, but this past year went by entirely too fast.  And a new year means my next birthday has come much quicker than I would have liked it to and is right around the corner *cringe*  

We had a great New Years Eve!  My dear friend Patty came over with her husband Mike.  It was a night of so many laughs and good times!  We had a huge tub of fireworks left over from two 4th of July’s ago.  It’s like the never ending batch of fireworks!  Those darn things have lasted us through two 4ths and 2 New Years and we were pretty liberal with them each time.  I think the humidity got to some of them because they either didn’t work or they would shoot in directions they shouldn’t have.  It was like fireworks roulette!  Note to self to pass to my husband next year: don’t buy so many fireworks on your next run to Alabama 🙂

Here are a couple fun snapshots of my kids and the fireworks.  So far from perfect but they make my heart happy!

Katie wasn’t scared of the fireworks at all, she loved them!

David’s favorites were the sparklers!  And I am not sure if they were affected by the humidity or they were just weird sparklers, but they didn’t sparkle.  The darn things just had a little ball of flame on them.  I was looking forward to shooting some cool sparkler shots but these just wouldn’t have worked.  LAME! 

The kids brought out their scooters (or scrooters as David calls them 😛 ) And had fun making a sparkler parade.  So I decided to have a little fun and got what I think is a pretty neat looking panning shot of Peyton on her scrooter

I am one of those who makes New Years resolutions every year and really try to stick to them as best as I can.  One of mine I made last year at this time was to get my photography business going and I am happy that ball is rolling!  Thank you so much to those I have shot pictures of.  Ya’ll are making so many dreams of mine come true and I am so grateful for you! I have so many great things coming up for my business and I can’t wait to share and reveal them in the next year to everyone.  I am so excited about all that will come ahead. 

And speaking of resolutions coming to fruition, another was to upgrade my camera.  I was beyond thrilled for that to happen on Dec 30th!  I swear this camera is already like my 4th child!  Here are the first shots out of it

So stay tuned because I am sure I will be shooting tons and will have lots to share!

I hope everyone had a wonderful New Years and I hope your next year brings you lots of joy and happiness 🙂

{Brant’s Sneak Peek}

The very first time I met Brant was at my son’s preschool over the summer for an open house/meet the teacher day.  He was sitting at a table by the pretend play section where my kids were also playing.  You can actually see the back of him playing with Katie in this blog post about that day!  I could tell instantly he was quite the ham.  When it was time to clean up the toys they had taken out he started singing in a mid level voice, “It’s time to clean up, it’s time to cleanup!”  And when he got to the next verse he shouted out, “A little louder now!” and then proceed to sing the sing in a loud voice LOL   Every time I see Brant he always bring a smile to my face.  He’s such a sweet boy and has such a sunny personality 🙂

When his mama asked me about doing his pictures I knew we’d only need a mini session to get what we needed for some Christmas pictures of him. As soon as we got him positioned this was the pose we got LOL

I told you he was a ham 🙂 

I just love how you can see how sweet and the warm personality he has here

Brant loved checking out the pictures I got of him in between set ups.  He agreed that he looked like quite the handsome boy!

Isn’t he too cute?!?

I just love this one!

Thank you so much Lori for having me take Brant’s pictures!  I had such a good time with ya’ll and I am excited to share the rest with you 🙂

{Apalachicola Anniversary}

Aimee contacted me several weeks ago about taking her family’s pictures on her parent’s 28th wedding anniversary.  They had never gotten their whole family together for pictures and this was a great occaision to do it.  The weather leading up to this shoot was just awful!  It was rainy and cold every single day.  The forecast for the day of the shoot started to look promising- it was a high of 50 but SUNNY!  Aimee decided to have the shoot in Apalachicola because that’s where she was raised along with her sister Brittany and her parents had lived there throughout their 28 year marriage.  I am so glad we had the shoot there!  Every place we shot at had a special meaning for their family, whether they helped pave a sidewalk or they owned the building.  And goodness, they seemed to know every person who passed on the street!  We’d be shooting pictures and a car would drive by, stop, and you’d hear someone shout out, “Happy Anniversary!”.  It was special to see a family who truely loved their home town and the people who loved them 🙂

And this family!  Goodness they are just super sweet!  I felt like after this shoot I walked away with a whole group of new friends.  And I love that they all have their own businesses too.  Aimee’s parents have a construction company in Apalachicola.  Her husband Jodie is a graphic design artist who builds and hosts websites.  You can check out his business Freehand Media here.  Aimee’s sister Brittany owns This Little Piggy, yes that super cute consignment store located in the 23rd street Publix shopping center.  And Aimee herself is a Zumba  instructor.  Talented bunch, huh?

Now onto the pictures because I know they are dying to see them!  Did I mention it was super cold?  It was and this family were like picture pros.

Here’s Aimee and her family

I just love this one of ya’ll!  Check out those gazes!

And here are their adorable boys.  The pictures in this sequence right after involved a head lock! 

This is Brittany and her beautiful family.  You wouldn’t know it by looking at this picture but Brittany and her little boy Ben were pretty sick that day.  They were such troopers!

How cute is this couple?!?

They have the most adorable little girl, Bella!

And now for their parents, Papa and Mimi.  Here they are, celebrating 28 years of marriage.  Mimi you are one beautiful grandmother 🙂

And I had to share a silhouette of the two of you together

Here’s the whole group together!

Thank you so much for allowing me to capture such a special day for your family.  It was so great meeting ya’ll!  I hope you loved your sneak peek and I cannot wait to show ya’ll the rest 🙂

{Jonathan+Tamara}

It has been awhile coming, but this was my very first stranger shoot.  And goodness I couldn’t have asked for better people!  Jonathan and Tamara are beautiful inside and out.  It was so fun hearing about how long they had been dating, their future plans, and all about their upcoming wedding in August!  If Tamara looks slightly familiar, she is the younger sister of Crystal.  I had heard a lot of great things about Tamara from Crystal so it was really nice putting it all together face to face.  Tamara is also part of the Wax Divas so if ya’ll are in need of a great wax, go see her and Crystal!

Jonathan and Tamara are one of the most stunning couples I have ever seen.  Tamara, you are going to make one gorgeous bride!

Check out her beautiful engagement ring

They are tons of fun too!

I adore this one of ya’ll!

We headed down to the beach that was right next to the pier Jonathan proposed on 🙂

And here’s a picture that will leave you wanting more

Thank you so much Jonathan and Tamara!  I felt like I walked away with two new friends.  I can’t wait to show ya’ll the rest!