About 1 crazy hour of shooting, 7 over stimulating parents, 11 grandkids, (one was not present but added in later) and 4 different photos combined to make one heck of a Christmas present for Lara's parents! I'm pretty certain they don't even know we have a blog so I think I'm safe on posting it here! If not, love you guys! Merry Christmas to ALL and may God truly bless your New Year! Remember this year it's all about knowing Him, the rest is just part of the journey!

These three images represent why I LOVE working with a select number of clients each year!

Because I love what I do and choose to work with fewer clients to keep it that way, I am stimulated and encouraged to get creative and unique images at every wedding! I take every wedding I shoot as a personal commission to capture the most artistic and creative images I possibly can! I'm not happy with simply a "good enough" attitude. I want excellence, fresh perspectives and crazy cool stuff at every wedding I shoot! So whether it's some guys getting crazy and having fun in front af a wall and capturing their shadows or whether it's a night shot and dragging my shutter to get some colors or using amazing windows and a beautiful bride to create a timeless bridal shot I go above and beyond to make it happen! Each of these images was created under a tremendous time crunch with unique circumstances that could have made it easy for me to say "Well, you can only get what they'll give you." But, because I come to my weddings fresh, excited and committed to capturing cutting edge images, I go for it every time! I absolutely love my job! I am truly blessed!

Thank you to all my wonderful clients this past 2007! Have a very merry Christmas and happy new year!

God bless you all! jim and lara

I recently had the privilege of shooting some promotional/cd cover pix for a really amazing individual Garry Jones. Gary and his wife Leesa are really wonderful people and it was as much fun hanging with them as it was taking their pix! Gary most recently has been a part of Mercy's Mark, but is now producing his own cd, it's really good! I received a complimentary copy. As soon as his website is up I'll post a link for the new stuff. Be on the lookout for it.

So last night I'm laying in bed with Brayden and I'm telling him how wonderful I think he is etc. and after I finished he say's to me "Dad, I think your the best gotopher ever!" I said "what honey? I don't understand?" He replied "Your the best gotopher ever." I still didn't understand, so I said "What honey?" He said "you know, work." I said "Oh, photographer!" He said "Ya!" So there it is, I have won the ultimate photography/gotopher award of all time!

A Tree, a really, really old cool tree. I actually think it's dead, so sad.

Santa Clause is coming to town, Santa Clause is coming to town, Santa Clause is coming to Town!

Dan "Beard" Banks aka Santa came over for a shoot last week! So fun. The kids LOVED it!

Karsyn is the most angelic baby I've ever seen! She is so happy almost all of the time! Rarely if ever cries and LOVES her brothers, mommy and daddy! When you make eye contact with her and smile this is what you get back! I am so thankful to Jesus that He has blessed us with such a treasure!

Happy Thanksgiving!

What are you Thankful for!

Come on, don't be afraid to leave a comment!

Announcing!!!!!!! ActionRunner 2.0 for PC and MAC.

For real, this tool has saved me more time than any other tool! I LOVE and use ActionRunner for every single wedding and event I shoot! No exceptions! It's really incredible.

So Tuesday night we had our nephew over for a sleep over! Good times right? Well until about 9:00 p.m. when Lara say's my stomache is hurting really bad! She'd had some pains all day but not too crazy. She's pretty tough with all she has been through, so I knew it must be bad if she was complaining about it. So, I went on line and she had all the symptoms for Appendicitis.

She headed to the emergency room (while I took care of our boys, nephew and Karsyn, kinda crazy, the boys that is.)

Joshua my brother in law came over and spent the night while I took Karsyn to the hospital to nurse and see Lara. It was appendicitis and yesterday she had an emergency appendectomy. They said if she had waited a day longer it would have burst.

So, the boys are at my parents, I am home with Karsyn and Lara is recovering in the hospital. They hope she'll be home today but it's taking more out of her than anticipated and she doesnt' feel good at all. She actually vomitted last night after I came home and is feeling really rough.

Pray her migraine headache goes away, the infection doesn't spread anywhere else and that she'll recover quickly. The Dr. said it was one of the worst one's he has seen and wants to have her come back for follow up as it could easily lead to more if it doesn't heal up free of infection etc.

What a year! This has been one of the best and hardest years of our life! God has brought us through so much, I'm just thankful that it has been together!

It's so fun having really great camera equipment on hand! I was outside blowing my leaves down to the street and Lara say's "Hey let's get a family picture in that big pile!" So, we got semi ready for it (I desperately need a haircut so I opted for the hat I had on!) and we set up the tripod and the camera and got some great shots with the whole family! Besides our initial shot at the hospital this is the first real family portrait we have!

Many of you don't know this, but I'm independently wealthy! My net worth is around 4 billion! Each of those billion are pictured with me above! For real I'm the wealthiest man on the planet!

And for the record, I'm not selling any of those valuable assets so I still gotta pay my house off, so if you want any pix like this one above give me a call! :)

I LOVE my wife and kids! I am so blessed. Very tired with a newborn and very busy with two active and social boys, but very much blessed and in love! I am REALLY trying to keep focused, keep first things first and am determined to not look back on this season of my life and regret the way I lived it. My children will only be young once and before long they'll have plenty of other options, but right now I am their first choice! O LORD help me to live wise! So little matters that we live and strive for and it's so easy to overlook that which matters most! I think hell will be a place where we'll always know what we could have had, should have had but we refused to choose it! As a wedding photographer I'm reminded how precious little ones are and how fast they grow up. I see mom's and dad's doing their father daughter and mother son dances and you can always see in the tears what they are feeling. Most often the tears I witness are one's that say to me "O how fast you've grown, I desperately wish I could go back and relive it all over, only this time I'd do it more carefully!" Rarely, but on occasion I have the privilege of witnessing those that are simply crying tears of joy! Joy, because they raised them well, without regret and now they see the fruit of their love and sacrifice as their little one has found their own love! I'm sure every parent has a little of both and I'm not always discerning things correctly but I just know I want to look at my little one's as they grow up and not look back with a bunch of regret because I wasted my life trying to impress or do so much for others (or rather myself) that I neglect that cherished moments on today! Today this manifested in letting my boys help me prime my deck. Can I tell you that it's really, really hard to get dried primer off of a 3 year old!!!! But we sure had fun working together. 4 times they both said "Dad, thanks so much for letting us paint with you, this is alot of fun! So, though I sure have alot of drips and high spots on my deck, they'll only remind me of how fun it was to do it together! Thank you Jesus for my wonderful wife and kids!

I love being Karsyn's dad. It's quite an adjustment but so good!

As my blogging tells, she's keeping us quite busy.

A star is born!

Here is a quick snapshot of Karsyn's first commercial shoot!

It was for an insurance company out west but was filmed here! It was pretty cool to be on a live set and see how they do stuff~ One cool thing they did was make it seem like day time when it was pitch black outside. Anyway, enjoy the shot!

She was a pefect angel, slept the whole time and has been sleeping great at home too!

Thank you Jesus!

Well we are settling into to home now with our new little bundle.

She's a great sleeper so far, we need to work on it at night though! She's kinda got it backwards, but not as bad as brayden did so I think we'll survive.

Funny quick story. We were being considered for karsyn modeling for a commercial that needed a baby, but they said we were pushing it too close to her birth etc. So they picked two other babies instead. However, I sent her pic anyway and they contacted us and said, "We canceled the other two, we want Karsyn!" Soooo, I assume that my bias has nothing to do with how cute she is!!!

We are headed off to watch the Buckeyes at grandma and grandpas house. We have the cutest little onesie (sp?) for her to wear that has buckeyes on it!

God bless you all!

Speaking of "God bless you all", have any of you read "Irresistable Revolution"? Wow, gotta read it, it's really making think about all I have, do, possess and access and asking tough questions about it all.

Also, if you haven't done so, please consider going to www.thirstrelief.org and sign up as a monthly donor, it's so easy and so effective. One $5 a month contribution will save a life every month! That's a life time of water for one individual for ony $5. Each month someone new will receive a lifetime of water! If you want to understand more about how $5 can really save a life read about it on the home page of www.thirstrelief.org

For real, God bless you all!

Introducing . . . Karsyn McKenna Hicks! 7lb 3oz, not sure how long but cute as can be!

Pray she stays as easy as she is so far! She's nursing great, beautiful and very happy so far!

If pregnancy wasn't so miserable and dangerous for lara we'd probably have more! Wow, 2 hours or so of contractions and 2.5 pushes and she was out! Dr. Raymond is an incredible Dr. and did a great job!

And I'm sooo proud of Lara, she's such an amazing woman and it was so wonderful to experience this together. After it was all done and visitors faded, we had the most amazing time in the birthing room just sitting and enjoying as we turned the lights off and enjoyed the sun coming through the window and we just sat with our little girl! What a hard road this has been but so worth it! Thank you Jesus! For real, thank you Lord! What a gift from above.

We are soooo in love already! More pix to come in the future. I'm off to the hospital!

Wednesday around 2:00 p.m.ish we expect to meet Karsyn face to face! Karsyn is our new little daughter that we are so excited to meet! I really am crazy excited to meet her. Honestly I'm a little afraid it wont be a her as my friends Mike and Kim Lotz thought they were having a girl too and it turned out to be a boy!!!! Our Dr. say's he's 99.9% sure and our boys were very obviously boys when we did the ultra sounds with them, soooooo, we'll see! Either way we'll be very excited to meet Karsyn or Carson :)

Now, a tribute to the beautiful woman that helps me look good in the photo above! My wife Lara. Wow, what a woman. She has been through a pretty rough ride with this pregnancy. Not sure how many of you know the details but she gets incredibly sick during her pregnancies to the point of total bed rest and in home care just to keep her from vomitting! She ended up this time hospitalized (was previously too, but before it was hydration related) this time she had an infection in her leg where she was receiving her anti-nausea meds. It turned very ugly, very fast. She could have easily lost her leg or have died! Dr. Raymond sent her to a specialist immediatly and they hospitalized her right away. Then, while in the hospital she almost died due to an allergic reaction! Our friend (and creative assistant) Anne Marie called her in the hospital and woke her up, she realized she couldn't breathe as she was passing out. So she hit the nurse button and a ton of Dr.s came rushing in and were hooking her up to a bunch of stuff etc. and going kinda crazy! They said "good thing your friend called you honey!" Well, she made it through and has just been dealing with the general overall misery of pregnancy that "most" women experience I think (though i hear some bizzare stories about those that actually feel better pregnant!" All that to say, Lara, I commend you, honor you, love and respect you for carrying three of our babies even through the misery of it all! I love you and so appreciate you for all you have and will do! Thank you. I'm excited to have a daddy's girl!

And YES, we do plan to be done, we're all about adoption from this point forward!

Quick Question for anyone reading this.

Would you be ticked if this image came to you in an email, unsolicited but as the result of signing up for Columbus Bride magazine? (Advertisers receive free access to their mailing list and I've never done anything with them until now, and only cause we've had so much fun shooting these sessions we figured we'd market to those that may or may not have been happy with their wedding pix. Not our couples of course :) but for those that maybe couldn't afford our wedding coverage but would still like a similar style only on a weeknight shoot!)

Anyway, I'm excited to shoot the sesssions for those that were happy to get it! No offense was intended if you did receive it and didn't want to. (this goes for any photogs that could be offended too, I've not had any negative response from any but I thought about it later and thought "Hmm, that could be offensive to a photog too if they think I'm trying to take their clients away from them or indicating that their work wasn't any good."

I did a Sr. Port session the other night. I had hoped to do alot of outside stuff too but it was just raining like crazy. I suggested we reschedule but they wanted to go ahead with them. We actually did a few shots in the rain too but I like the studio stuff best.

Anyway, Jackie is a super sweet girl and it was fun to get to know her and her mom!

This has been a pretty big week for Ashton! Tuesday was Orientation at Kindergarten (I seriously cried like a baby. It was very hard for me to send him off to school and still contemplating alternative ways to educate.) I actually heard a great quote from John Wimber "I don't mind education so long as it doesn't get in the way of learning!" This can be very true when a child doesn't learn affectively in a traditional "education" model. Ashton is definitely a artist who reflects much of me, my parents say he's EXACTLY like I was at that age. (artistic, talkative, creative and managing, he's always orchestrating something and getting others to help him fulfill his plans.) Anyway, we'll see where that goes. I have so many thoughts on this, but I'll save it for some other time.

On Wed. we did a daddy date and went crawdad hunting for hours in the river! What an amazing time. Ashton kept saying to me "Dad, this is soooo fun. I'm so glad we did this!" I even blitzed on an important conference call as a result of not having my watch or phone with me in the river. It was absolutely worth it and they were incredibly gracious in understanding.

Then the first and second day of kindergarten and a lost tooth! Enjoy the pix above they are of the first morning of school and the lost tooth. The last pic it's hard to tell but he's holding his tooth on a string.

I'm so blessed.

Karsyn is on her way in less than 2 weeks! Keep us in your prayers.

WOW! That's about all I can say! Wow!

We just finished the first ever Davis Photography, Davis Tools Seminar!

It was titled "Summer Revival Seminar" and that it did! I can't tell you how fun it was to hang with some amazing people and grow and learn together as we discovered and shared knowledge on lighting, capture, editing/workflow, album design, (a favorite of the attendees,cause my wife rocks!) business sense, marketing and cause marketing and more! It was awesome!

I'm gonna post a little show it web show later that incorporates all the images from attendees and all! Also, I'll post links to their websites!

Thank you Mike Lotz for all your help! You rock! Also, thanks to Rob from Encore! And thank you all who supported our event by giving some great hook up pricing on some cool products! Bludomain, Show it Web, theknot, Me Ra Koh and our very own ActionRunner!

Also, a big thank you to our amazing models Devon and Rachel and Elliot! You guys were amazing!

Last but not least, thank you to all who attended! I'll be posting links and our group shot soon!

God bless you all,

Jim and Lara

We are so excited to do our up coming seminar!

So far we have attendees from Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and . . .

Congratulations to Linda Turnbough for winning bragging rights for the farthest traveled so far for the Summer Revival Seminar on August 27th and 28th.

She's coming from Texas!

3 Seats are still open! If your serious about taking your images and business to the next level or even just getting started in the business of photography (especially weddings) then you will certainly have spent your money well.