Karen Jacot / the blog » Uncategorized

oh hi it’s another test

Karen — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:46:24 +0000

because i can’t make decisions and am not a graphic designer, i still don’t know what i want this blog to look like. so i’m playing around with it some more. smaller pictures, because i just can’t get into the bigger ones.

600px wide. how does this look?

i think i’m going with 600px, people. now there are are only, like, 100 or so other decisions still left to make.

albums

Karen — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:52:29 +0000

Oy. I am so behind on blogging. First up, here are a few pics of an album I did for a client. This is what a session album looks like. I think they’re awesome. The photos are mounted on the pages with mats. This album has 30 pages (the maximum available–you can see how thick this is already).

happy birthday!

Karen — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:22:35 +0000

On Wednesday, Lyle turned 3. I know everyone says it, but I can’t believe it’s already been 3 years. When we decided to have a baby, that’s all I really thought about…having a BABY. I did not think about what it might be like to have a little boy, a 3-year-old who goes to camp and loves the color yellow and plays with trains and has (strong) preferences for what foods he eats. Probably because I just didn’t know what it might be like–I had no idea how life with a 3-year-old worked.

When I picked him up from camp after lunch on his birthday, I took him to a cupcake boutique in Montrose to celebrate. He picked out a cupcake with green frosting and sprinkles, and after he ate all the icing off, he asked for my icing. (Which I still hadn’t touched, because I was too busy taking pictures of him.) I hate icing, so I scooped the icing off mine and plopped it on top of his cupcake, and he ate that, too. He thought the visit to the cupcake store was a great way to celebrate. I did too.

life is going on without me

Karen — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:37:40 +0000

The week before last, Lyle and I took a trip out to San Diego to visit friends there. It was our first time back since we moved away last summer, and it was bittersweet. Several things had changed–one of my favorite restaurants was no longer there, kids are all older, there are lots of new babies–and it made me kind of sad to see that everything’s still going on there without me around to be a part of it.

I did, however, manage to bring back some things to help remind me of that place…namely as many Trader Joe’s Indian dinners as I could fit in my suitcase. I used to eat these at least 3 times a week for lunch. Why are there no Trader Joe’s in Houston???

These two spent a lot of time playing “mail,” putting toys and other objects back and forth through the mail slot in the wall.

scott & ashley

Karen — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:12:20 +0000

My brother and his girlfriend were in Houston over New Year’s, visiting from San Francisco, and while they were here they asked me to take some pictures of the two of them. We shot these on New Year’s Eve, about an hour before sunset, in Rice Village, a little shopping area next to Rice. I don’t usually photograph adults, and in some ways I find it harder than shooting kids because it can be harder to get them to relax and act natural and not look too stiff. (Hard for me, anyway–this is the area I most want to work on–making people feel relaxed in front of the camera so we can get photos that really show their personalities.) But in other ways, wow…people who do exactly what you ask! They move where you want them; they stay still when you want them to! It was a nice change of pace from chasing kids around.

he made me work for it

Karen — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 02:20:05 +0000

Today I had my first photo shoot since moving to Houston! Yay! I am excited to get back into the swing of things. This 17-month-old gave me about 30 minutes to photograph him this morning. I had forgotten how hard this age is to photograph. Too young to really cooperate at all, but old enough to want to run everywhere and never stay where I tried to put him. And after half an hour of running around with me, he was done.

I’ve been in the mood for b&w lately, but he has the biggest, bluest eyes so I had to include at least one in color here.

holiday cards

Karen — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:10:46 +0000

It’s the end of September, and time is totally getting away from me. It’s time to start thinking about the holidays. I’ve got some gorgeous card designs this year that are available with new photo sessions and to any clients with past sessions that have images they’d like to use from those sessions. These cards are press-printed, which means they’re printed like the regular Hallmark-type greeting cards, NOT on photo paper. (Like my holiday cards last year, for those who remember them.)

I am offering 16 different cards this year. All cards are 5×7 and have corresponding backs. The cost is $40 per set of 25. They come with white envelopes.

Here are samples of three of them (you can see I started putting photos in my samples but it was getting too time-consuming, so I quit partway through). You can see all of the designs (front and back) in my holiday card gallery.

new tricks

Karen — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:25:28 +0000

For a few weeks, Lyle has liked it when we fold his fingers so he can hold up two of them to show his age. If you asked him, “How old are you?” (or even “What is your name?”) he would hold out his hand to me and say, “More two,” which meant, of course, that he wanted me to make his fingers into a two.

But now he has learned how to do it himself, and he is VERY proud of this trick.

a tribute to san diego

Karen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:42:01 +0000

We left San Diego last Friday. I didn’t really dwell on saying goodbye to it as a place since I was caught up in the details of moving. On our last morning there, at the forefront of my mind was keeping the cat as comfortable as possible (he threw up about three times on our flights–it was gross) and keeping the tot from wreaking too much havoc. He’s flown a fair bit for a two-year-old…this was his 20th flight already. And I experienced both my best moments flying with him (he slept the entire duration of our second leg after we took off) and the worst (before we took off on that leg, he was kicking the seat in front of him and then screaming at the top of his lungs when I held his legs down–it was a very long ten minutes).

But now that we are on solid ground with some time to relax at my mom’s house in Dallas, I’ve had a chance to think about all the places and sights I am going to miss in and around San Diego. It is an amazing place.

Palm trees in our neighborhood

Sunrise from the park

A few shots of the beach in our neighborhood, Ocean Beach, all taken after sunset on different days

The road up to the mountain town of Julian

Outside of Julian

Winery, Temecula, CA

Joshua Tree National Park

Moonrise in Joshua Tree NP

The Flower Fields in Carlsbad

San Diego waterfront

Point Loma Tidepools near high tide

changes are coming

Karen — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:40:55 +0000

All the orders have been placed. I’m now just waiting to get the prints from my lab. I should just manage to get those delivered before we leave here. The movers come in a week and the reality of that hasn’t really hit me yet. At least they are packing for us, so I don’t have that task to deal with, too.

I’ve been working on redesigning my website lately. Just tweaking the existing design, really. But all new colors, so it’ll look pretty different. I hope to reveal that here very soon.

And so this isn’t all text, here’s a photo. Most of you probably know that I have a photoblog where I post a new photo each day (taken that day) of my son. I’ve never missed a day in over 2 years! They’re just snapshots of his day, and as annoyed as he sometimes gets with me for always pointing the camera at him, I hope that some day he appreciates having this collection of photos from each day. Here’s one from last week. (And the whole website can be found at CuriousLyle.)