I have had an army of people take care of Naima while my Mom has been in an out of the hospital the last few months. I am in the debt of all those people:

• Jay
• Jason
• Gary
• Logan
• Alexis
• Johnathan
• Amy Herrick
• Carla
• Teresa
• Jim Jordan
• Jesse

Plus, I’m sure there are at least a couple of others that I am forgetting. Thank you and keep up the good work!

More pictures of my golden beast:

I’m sure there will be a ton more Naima pictures as the days, months, and years go by!

Valentine’s Day 2012

If I were in the frame of mind to send out Valentines this year, it would have involved this picture. Of course, I wasn’t in such a state of mind, so you get to see it late, but as they say, that is life.

I also played with trying to set a heart shaped sucker on fire, but it turns out that it is really hard to set a sucker on fire AND the sucker didn’t really look like a heart.

This more abstract image of a heart is the other image I played with before I packed up all the conversation hearts and gave them to Jen. She actually enjoys these bits of nastiness.

On a sidenote, Jen says that if you put a piece of bread in the container with conversation hearts that have gotten too hard, they return to being “edible”. Derrick did not comment while she explained this to me.

Shannon contacted me about contributing some photos to the wall near her desk at the United Way of Story County office a couple months back.

I was able to get those pictures ordered for her and she got them on the wall a couple weeks back. I don’t have a picture of the wall at this time as I haven’t had a chance to go see it, but here is a general idea of what it looks like:

To see those pictures a tad bit larger:

When I get a chance to see the new Photography 139 Gallery, I will post a photo.

A few months back I stepped in for Vest in photographing the confirmation students at his church, St. John’s Lutheran, in Madrid. Here are a few of those photos:

The images below came from the following folder:

Backup/My Pictures/Misc/Camping

Next week’s folder will be:

Backup/My Pictures/Misc/Fireworks

Here are a couple photos of Naima when she helped Jay & I carve our pumpkins on Halloween and a couple from her first experience with snow.

Reason and Faith

I’m not sure I ever really got the picture of Willy that I wanted, but I do know for sure that I didn’t want Naima in the picture. It is funny how a dog that has a knack for being extremely difficult to photograph, would fight her way into this picture of Willy.

Oh well, she adds some humor to this photo.

Here are a few other pictures from the Reason and Faith Series.

If you are sensing a special glow in Willy it is because these pictures were taken the same day that he won a 5K in Nevada, with a certain amount of ease it should be pointed out.

Follow @photography139

Truth is that I probably don’t have enough photos taken to fill out all the Random Wednesdays that I have missed over the last couple of months. I have had to turn down numerous gigs and it shows in my lack of photos that I have taken.

Probably my best chance to fill up many of these open weeks will be to break up all the photos of Naima that I have taken. But I don’t know that I’ve taken enough of those pictures, but I’ll make a game effort.

The pictures for this journal entry are of Derrick & Jen’s little angel Evie taken when she was a little more than a year old.

I look forward to the next time Evie needs a photo session!

I only had time last year to make a handful of calendars. If you didn’t get a calendar this year, I am sorry. I only had one left and I gave it to Nader because he actually called and asked for one. If somebody begged I suppose I could print another one off, but who would want a calendar that is almost 25% useless?

Here are the images from this years Photography 139 Calendar:

Front Cover


January


February


March


April





June


July


August


September


October


November


December

As usual, Mike Vest helped finish up the calendars with his hole punching and binding skills. Thanks Mike!

The final submissions for the failed Random Weekly Photo Experiment. SELF-PORTRAIT:

Mike Vest of Waxen Media


Christopher D. Bennett

So what will replace this failure on Mondays? Perhaps another experiment destined to fail?