wedding photography | cape cod & boston, ma

In case you missed it, I sent out my seasonal newsletter last week on Valentine’s Day to announce the official beginning to the Wedding Season! If you happen to know a couple getting married this year, you will be eligible to receive a $150 gift credit for each new couple you refer to Sage Brousseau Photography… and the couple gets $150 too (email me for more info)!

Above is a little “behind-the-scenes” peek at how I package my wedding products. I gravitate toward simple, clean design for my wedding albums, and I love to use recycled and natural products as much as I can (like the woven hemp DVD case in the background). Click here if you want to take a peek inside this album, leave a comment and let me know what you think!

valentine's day | my d.i.y. life

By now, you have surely seen the lolipop-in-hand photo valentines like this and these… which I discovered the day after Valentine’s day last year… blerg! So I spent the last 365 days just waiting to do it this year! (Full disclosure): Actually, I totally dropped the ball last year and forgot to send my preschooler to school with Valentines: Bad Mommy! So yeah, I totally went all out this year. My daughter’s school recommended that we not send sweets (gee, why?), I decided to follow the rules (this time) and go the non-sugary route and put a spin on the trend, subbing pencils for pops… plus we got to use a sweet pun. Happy Valentine’s Day!

finding the light

baby's first photo shoot | arlington, ma

2011 was a great year for many people for so many reasons. For Candice and Tony it marked the birth of their baby girl Eloise! I got the chance to meet little Eloise the week before Christmas and take few special shots of her and her proud parents. Candice and I are friends through our love of art, crafts and yarn (she’s also the talent behind shortcake scraps Valentine’s Day is coming up… I’m just sayin’). It was so great catching up with her and getting to spend time with her and her little family, I hope this next year is filled with just as much joy for them!

more on resolutions | 2012

Does your brain ever feel clogged? Mine does. I know I said I wasn’t planning to make any formal resolutions for 2012, but the truth is there’s a lot I want to accomplish this year. So much so, that it’s making my brain a bit frazzled as I attempt to organize it all and prioritize all those… things, ideas, wishes in my head. I’ll try and sort it all out and get back to you.

cameras, photography, art & dreams

I’ve been having a lot of weird dreams lately, a few nights ago I dreamed I was using some of my old film equipment. I haven’t touched film in a little over four years, I was hold out for quite a while, and I had big plans to someday build a darkroom in the basement, too. But then digital became so darn accessible and well, the rest is history.

I think my dreams are trying to tell me something, to get out my old Yashica, some film, make some art, and see what happens.

^{from Without my undergrad thesis, taken with a Yashica Mat G}

happy new year | make a wish

Welcome Baby New Year! As much as I enjoy Christmas, anticipation is a killer and I’m always a bit happy to be on this side of it. A new year is always full of such promise, and I love to look out a the horizon with high hopes. I’m not going to make new year’s resolutions because I’m pretty bad at follow through— I couldn’t even manage a 52 week photo project last year (remember that?). So, instead of trying to hold myself accountable for some monumental goal, I’ve decided to just pick a mantra for the year (more on that later) and keep adding to and crossing off my “life list.”

I started my life list a few years ago when I heard Ellen DeGeneres mention hers on her show. I had just had my daughter, and was hugely—ginormously—sleep deprived and feeling quite overwhelmed with everything about being a new mom, creating my life list became a welcome diversion and something I’d been meaning to do for a while anyway.

Making a life list doesn’t have to be a big deal or morbid either. Here’s some great advice for creating your own, for example: include some easily accomplished minor goals along with such lofty ideals as “find inner peace” and “climb Mt. Everest”. Naturally, my list has grown and changed a bit since I first started recording it, and I’ve only crossed off a few things. But for me it’s not really about removing things from my list as it is about personal evolution and reminder to myself. It’s not too late to make a resolution or kick-off the new year on the right foot, check out another amazing guide to making attainable goals for the new year or Positively Present’s free 2012 planner.

P.S.: my personal mantra this year is something along the lines of this: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”—Theodore Roosevelt

Happy New Year!

christmas wishes | last post in 2011

Thanks everyone for a really great year, like any it had it’s ups and downs, but I think it was overall pretty wonderful! I’m going to spend the next few days getting some work done, visiting with friends, and preparing for Christmas dinner (I’ll be making a buche de noel again this year, our new holiday tradition). Have a magical holiday, and see you in 2012, a new year full of promises!

_{This photo (above) was entered into the I Heart Faces photo challenge – www.iheartfaces.com}

12 days of giving | chookooloonks giveaways

I’m super excited about the giveways happening on Karen Walrond’s blog— Chookooloonks— starting tomorrow Monday, December 12th through Friday, December 23rd. Karen will feature 12 days of giveaways and chances to win gifts from brilliant photographers, designers, artists and even a musician and a potter… including myself! It is such an awesome honor to be included in this holiday giveaway.

My work will be featured a week from today over at Chookooloonks, so keep checking back to learn more (and maybe win something)! The winner next Sunday will be able to choose an 11×14 fine art print of their choice from my gallery of prints. If you aren’t following Chookooloonks already, you should! Not just because there is a chance to win something, but because Karen’s an interesting and insightful writer, photographer, photoessayist and is “wildly convinced you’re uncommonly beautiful.”

holiday D.I.Y. | mini gingerbread houses

This year I decided to start a new holiday tradition: we would make a gingerbread house. I’ve never really made one, although I do remember my mom making a gingerbread castle when I was a kid, I think it must have been for a school fundraiser, or something (because I know I never got to eat it), and it was magnificent with stacked Oreo towers and sugar cone turrets— it was definitely the first time I ever saw silver dragees! As my “helper” is just four-years-old this year, I opted for a kit with pre-baked panels and an assortment of candies included (although I did buy a few “extras” like the wafer cookies for the shutters), but I’m already dreaming about next year… and there’s tons of inspiration out there on the interwebs: of course Martha has a number of awesome examples. I love the mini no-bake cottages like this one:

And this website has 38 cute examples of gingerbread cookies and houses that are fun and perfect for kids, which led me to these awesome mini houses on a stick!

I’m going friggity-crazy over the mini gingerbread house mug-toppers at Not Martha, she’s so darn clever!

I think our house came out cute, especially for a first time, you can check out the details here. Next time, I am definitely going to bake my own panels, and maybe even make a small village of cottages with melted candy windows!