I can't believe this is my 4th year of doing this?  That's a little scary!  Anyway, for those of you who haven't been following this blog for the last couple of years (which is more than a handful I'm sure)… I do a little contest at the end of the year in which I allow people to vote for their favorite image in a certain category.  The first year I did "Best Cake" which you can re-visit HERE, the second year I did "Best Boudoir" shot HERE, and last year I did "Best Portrait" HERE. 

This year I am opening the voting for "Best Bouquet."  The rules are simple, you are allowed to vote for your favorite picture for any reason.  If you like it best because of the photography – fine – if you like it because of the actual flowers – gravy – if you like it because it's your friend's – sweet.  You can like it "the best" for any reason at all, I don't like to limit people to having to judge on a specific item or reason.  To vote just click on the comments section and leave the number in which you'd like to vote for.  In future years we'll be able to vote right in the entry for those using blog readers, but for now we will have to use the comments for one more year.

With all of that said… vote away!  The winner will be announced on December 15th at 5pm and will receive a $100 gift certificate.  If you'd like to use them for prints I will make sure they arrive before Christmas as a nice stocking stuffer :)
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I'm sorry I could not put everyone's bouquet in the contest, but I already put up too many choices as is.  These were just some of my favorite shots from the year after looking back.  Thanks everyone!

ATTN : PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU ONLY VOTE IN THIS BLOG ENTRY, AND THAT YOU ONLY VOTE ONCE. THANK YOU

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This past Sunday I took my first ever trip up to Lake Placid.  Being from Upstate NY it's actually rather amazing that I've never been up there, and now after my shoot on Sunday I'm regretting that I never made the trip in the past.  What a gorgeous town!  Wedding coordinator extraordinaire (and friend) Cindy Byno put me in touch with Robyn and Hanif and we had a great afternoon and engagement shoot.  I had a wedding down near the city the previous day, so getting back up to Lake Placid for the afternoon shoot meant I was cutting it a little close.  What was real funny though is how much everyone complained how "cold" it was on Saturday (including me, numerous times actually), but when I arrived in Lake Placid on Sunday it was almost 20 degrees colder with several inches of snow on the ground.  I felt like I drove into a different month!  Robyn and Hanif were serious troopers though, and a photographer's dream to work with.  Check out these smiles in this weather!

This old barn in the middle of nowhere got me more excited than I should have been :)

Beautiful blue skies and a clear day made for great shooting

Thanks again to Robyn and Hanif for being such troopers and so positive, and to Cindy for showing us around and a great afternoon.  I hope everyone out there has a great Thanksgiving with their families!  This year is especially brutal for me being a Lions fan, but here's holding out hope that perhaps they can give me a Turkey Day surprise upset of the Titans!

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Our little Lillie has officially turned 4.  I'm sure every parent says this but we ended up with the best kid anyone could ever ask for.  She listens, she's smart, and she's about the most precious thing you'd ever come across.  She's also the luckiest kid you'll ever come across as well because she's got so many people in our family that love her and spoil the heck out of her.  Believe me when I say we are off to my parent's house, and she will be getting more toys than a ToysRUs truck.  She deserves them all though, she really makes mine and Alisha's lives better.

As many of you know I'm still fairly young in life (mid 20s) and really didn't think I'd be a father at this point in my life.  At least that wasn't the plan when I was straight out of high school and ready to set the world on fire as the greatest photographer ever.  My path has changed a bit since those days and while I know many people out there who don't have kids think "I'm not ready for a child yet," I couldn't be more grateful for how things have worked out.  I don't think there's ever a point in a person's life where all of a sudden they are "ready" to have a child, I mean how could you be?  But I now know what it's like when people say it was the best thing they ever did.  No matter how stressed I ever get with work or just with life in general I can peak in her room on my way to bed and watch her little self sleep so soundly.  It's a very peaceful scene to watch and restores a little perspective in my mind for the night (even if she's dreaming of Elmo feeding her candy on a beach with mermaids).  Happy birthday Lillie!

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We have plans for a brand new blog to be launched in the next 4-6 weeks and I can't wait to share it with everyone.  As with most things you see from us, we'll be working with my good friends over at Elevation on this project which means it'll be worth checking out.  The reason I mention this today is because I'm looking for help on this project.  Some of the features I want added in to our new blog will be…

1. A rating system that allows readers to give each entry a rating.  If you love a particular entry and/or picture you can give it a high rating.  This will hopefully allow users to search for highest ranked entries, etc.  I'm also in the midst of working on a plan that gives the highest ranked entry per year some sweet prize at the end of the year as well. 

2. Email this feature.  I know everyone has this, it's about as new as a comments section on the blog.  I hope to make it more prominent though so people are always reminded they can easily forward things on the blog without copying and pasting. 

3. Downloads.  I'd like people to be able to easily take a shot from the blog and make it a screen saver and/or desktop with a click or two of the mouse.  A print this feature would be nice too since I know more people than I'd ever have expected actually make printouts from the blog sometimes for easy reference to friends, family, in the office, etc.  Obviously the resolution isn't high or it would take forever to load my blog, but the bigger pictures should be enough for a quick fun printout.

Anyway, today I'm asking for your help if you'd be so kind to donate a minute.  If there are any cool features out there that you've thought of or you've seen before that you think would be a great addition to the blog please by all means forward it over.  I think with all of the blog readers and RSS feeds out there comments have pretty much died on the vast majority of blogs so I'm not keen on any sort of commenting system (a simple one is fine for the 2 people out there still leaving me comments).  Any sort of quirk or idea that encourages interaction and excitement is totally fine, there are no rules for the ideas or wrong ideas.  Fire away!  You can leave a comment here or email me at luke@lukewalkerphotography.com.

Thanks everyone and I don't think there's anyone out there with better ideas than the people who read this blog.

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Today we are out of the office, celebrating Alisha's birthday down in Manhattan.  Amazingly enough I think this is the first trip to NYC for the two of us that has no affiliation with our businesses at all.  I booked a sitter for the day and over-night and we are off to the city to stay the night, have a great dinner, and ice skate at Rockefeller Center.  She wants to go to Tiffany as well so that's obviously going to happen since she's the birthday girl.

Happy Birthday babe and I hope we're having a fantastic day as people are reading this!  You mean the world to me and I'm lucky to have you and Lillie in my life :)))

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We just landed back here in NY earlier this afternoon from a great trip to St. Louis.  Alisha, Lillie, and myself went to STL for some business (which we do from time to time since Ali is from there) and I really enjoyed myself.  I tried my best to disconnect for the 5 days I was there and I didn't even bring my laptop.  A real first for me for sure and to be honest… I loved it!  I had my blackberry and was checking it fairly frequently so if anything was time sensitive I could still reply, but otherwise I tried to just soak in a city I really enjoy visiting and to have fun. 

Last Friday Alisha and I went down to Laclede's Landing in downtown which is this really old feeling part of the city with original cobblestone streets and converted warehouses.  If we were to ever open a branch of Lillie Studios in STL (which is something we would potentially visit in the next couple of years if things keep growing) that is the exact first place I'd look at.  I had an engagement shoot set up at Forest Park with Melissa and Kedric, but once I saw Laclede's Landing I had to switch locations.  Fortunately for me, as you all know, I get the coolest couples so they were totally up for it and off we went:
I was excited that they brought their friends along

It was very refreshing to work in such a cool place, especially with all of the parks I've been in lately

The money shot

Thanks so much you two, and I really appreciate your willingness to make this an awesome shoot!  I can't wait until the wedding, and to work with my fabulous friend Sabrina Torti who will be coordinating.

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I've been receiving a lot of emails in regards to holiday print orders lately.  In response I've decided to slash the print prices between now and Christmas to make even the largest of prints very affordable for this upcoming holiday season.  I really do feel blessed that the economic downturn has not affected us and/or our business, but I do realize it has had an effect on many people out there.  I've received more inquiries this year than any other year in regards to people doing their own printing.  I do understand why this is requested and that people want to get nice pictures for the holidays without breaking the bank.  However it breaks my heart to know people are going to be seeing my work on prints that are not up to our standard.  I hate to see people spending so much for quality photography and then displaying it on less than the best prints.

So with that said I've decided to do something drastic this year to cut down (hopefully eliminate) on people printing from home – I've slashed all the print prices on our cart by 50%.  My print prices are fairly low by industry standard anyway, but now with them cut in half you can get quality finished photographs for as low as $5. 

I've always had holiday sales like a 2 for 1 and also a 20% off, but never anything even close to this.  Beautiful family pictures are always a great gift at the holiday (we should know we give them every year!) and hopefully now they are affordable for absolutely everyone.

You can visit our online cart HERE

Enjoy!

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I had the pleasure of meeting up with Alia and Rahul the other day in NYC for an absolutely awesome engagement shoot that I've been excited to share.  I met Alia at Seema and Mo's wedding back in August and had the chance to sit down and chat with her later on in the evening and we immediately hit it off.  I left that night having a pretty good feeling about working with her and Rahul and the more I've gotten to know of them the more excited I get.  After what I felt was one of my favorite engagement shoots of the year I know the wedding is going to be a real treat to photograph!

Alia had a great suggestion in Central Park but unfortunately we were supposed to have a permit.  This shot was so good that even though we had been told to leave twice we had to chance it to get it (those of you who know me can totally see this right?!)

As much as I love the one above, I think this might have been my fav

This one just says NYC to me with the cab and everything.

The colors in NYC were still close to peak (although going fast)

Thanks so much for spending the afternoon with me you two, and I hope you had a great time that evening after I left!  Also a big thank you to Alia's sister for letting us score this shot above and for opening her home to me.

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I was able to sneak a little bit of video in during Alisha's last boudoir shoot and Ashely was kind enough to let me post some of it.  I'm really excited to share!  We plan on making video boudoir sessions a nice little attraction to the Lillie Studios offering here within the next month.  We both feel like it can add a really cool dimension to the boudoir sessions being done.  Obviously we're both photography freaks (to say the least) but the ideas and possibilities with video open up a whole new realm of possibilities.

*edit*
I decided with all of the traffic coming to the blog because of the many engagement shoots I have been doing lately that some family members might not want to see this video on top of my blog.  Perhaps I'm being overly cautious, but instead I'm going to post a link to the LILLIE STUDIOS BLOG instead.  Besides you should be following that blog anyway :))

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This fall season has been engagement season for me.  We've had a really incredible fall (I guess to make up for a less than exciting summer) and I've been able to take advantage of it with some really great e-shoots.  I had the pleasure of joining Payal and Karanjit on their old college campus for a fun shoot yesterday. 

One of my favs

The colors weren't too bad yesterday….

That light peaking in behind them was prime, and also gone after about 10 minutes

Thanks so much for showing me around your old stomping grounds you two, and for a great afternoon.  Looking forward to what I know is going to be an awesome wedding!

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