Never stop learning.

These are words I try to live by. No matter how good I think I am at something or how much I think I “get it” … there’s always room for improvement, there’s always room to grow, there’s always something more to learn. Call me a career student if you want, and I’ll proudly sport a backpack for life and eat cup noodles like a broke college student with a smile on my face. 😀

Yep it's true, I married a Bruin. Kinda crazy huh?

I love learning and if I had it my way, I’d probably still be at USC wearing sweats, rockin my Adidas and sitting in front of the classroom like a nerd. Yeah, I was a nerd and I have the Magna Cum Laude mention on my diploma to prove it … although I do have to admit the last time I saw my diploma it was in a wrinkly priority mail envelope in the trunk of my car. HA! Nice way to treat a $100,000+ college education huh?

We've agreed that he gets to talk trash during basketball season and I own the football season.

Anyhoo, one of the ways I try to continue to educate myself in photography is by participating in local photography shootouts, where more experienced photographers come to share tips and tricks on ways to improve your shooting during an actual session. During the summer, Tommy and I participated in the So Cal Shootout for the first time, indulging ourselves in lessons focused on a myriad of photography genres. First up, was babies and newborns. And oh baby, was I lost!!!

At that point, Tommy and I had experience photographing kids but we had not done any sessions with babies, toddlers or newborns so we were blank slates, eager and ready to learn.

It was a new experience having to crouch down on our knees for the entire session and not make a sound so our sweetpea of a model wouldn’t wake up from her slumber. Being quiet is HARD for me. I’m so use to chit chatting and laughin out loud with couples and kids, so even when I wanted to scream out “OMG you’re so freakin adorable” to this little girl, I had to bite my tongue.

Tommy definitely has the patience and ease to be a good newborn/baby photographer and I am constantly joking with him that one day he’s gonna open his own studio and I’ll see his name in lights … “Tommy Walden – Newborn Photographer For The Stars.” He always laughs at this notion, tells me I’m talkin crazy and then spits out some manly sports jibberish/trash talk to remind me this newborn studio of his is not in his DNA nor in our future, LOL. Hmph … we shall see!

Anyhoo, here are some photos of our first at-bat with baby photography and if you wanna see more of this beautiful little mama, click on the thumbnails at the bottom of this post 😉 Mom and daughter are undeniably gorgeous!

(P.S. For some reason, my photos with hubby are included in the thumbnails of baby girl, LOL. We are clearly not as cute as she, so please ignore, my blog program is trippin big time!)