Outdoor Yoga Mini Sessions

As my friends and family you know and have seen over the years that I have a passion for photography. Only recently in the last 3 to 4 years have I discovered the practice of Yoga and it has literally changed my life! I might blog about this in a later post, but for now you are just going to have to take my word for it! It was not until after I graduated my Teacher Training at the Colorado School of Yoga this spring that I realized how important beautiful yoga pictures are for the promotion of your Yoga Business. I also didn't know how much fun and how difficult these sessions are! 

Yoga teachers are often very self aware of their own posture in addition having a "yogini-photographer" who is watching your form can be quite helpful! Sometimes you have to wait until the exact right minute to take the shot or move up or down just a tad to capture the pose in full beauty! Over the last few months I have thoroughly enjoyed the Yoga Sessions that I have photographed and edited. My love for photography and Yoga have happily collided and I could not be more excited about it! I have gotten such great responses and inquiries that I have decided to set two days in September aside, the First and the Second, and dedicate them to Yoga Mini Sessions.

I have been in my Photography business for the last 10 years and you would not believe how many times I have been asked: "Do you offer mini-sessions?" I do them rarely. I prefer to spend a good amount of time with my families and seniors because I really like to get to know you as a family, talk about your day, I like to connect with your kids and make them laugh and set them at ease. I also want to offer enough time to my Seniors for a change of clothes or two. These things and this connection is very difficult to achieve in 30 minutes or less! After some reflection I decided to offer mini-sessions for Yoga Teachers because I understand and know that Yoga Teachers are overstretched and underpaid. Or as my friend posted on Facebook the other day:

Q. "What do Yoga Teachers make?" A. "They make a difference, okay!!!"

Believe me I understand money is tight and offering mini-sessions helps reduce the cost off your individual session! Most Yoga Teachers have a very good idea of the image they would like to convey to their clients and usually come well prepared and know exactly what Asanas they would like to be photographed in. So as summer is slowly drawing to an end ("Say it ain't so!!!) the light in the sky turns a beautiful dim blue and the colors of plants and trees start to change, it is THE perfect time for your Yoga Promotional Photos!

If you are looking for fresh new photos to promote your Website, Blog or Facebook or you need some new photos to add to your personal Yoga Portfolio I would love to take them for you. Stop using your iPhone and let me take your photos! I have ten years of experience as a photographer and -bonus- I am a yoga teacher myself so I know how to capture you in your best light!

For a limited time I am offering Yoga Mini Sessions in a beautiful, quiet and ethereal outdoor location in the plains outside of Peyton, Colorado. Sessions will be in 30 minute increments. You will receive ten professionally edited photos from your shoot, with the option to purchase more if you'd like.

View my portfolio here: www.karinwinterart.com

Please bring your yoga mat and any props you think you might like to use. Some great prop ideas are prayer beads, necklaces & bracelets, a favorite book, a colorful blanket, blocks, straps. Feel free to bring anything you like!

Use the sign up list and please pick a day and time that works best for you! Choose your session day and time here:

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/508084ba8a822a3f58-yoga

The mini sessions will cost $130 with a $40 non refundable deposit to reserve your spot. Remaining payment is due on day of session in cash or check with the option to pay entire amount at signup.

I can't wait to meet and photograph my fellow Yoga Teachers! If you are a Yoga Teacher feel free to contact me with any questions you have. If you know a Yoga Teacher I would love for you to share this post with them!

Namaste, Karin

Outdoor Yoga at King's Deer Golf Club

This is the amazing view from the clubhouse of King's Deer Golf Club in Monument, Colorado. I started teaching an outdoor Intergated Vinyasa class right from the patio! I hope to see you in class! Check out my schedule under my yoga tab! 

I don't know how to blog!

So here it is, the last task I have is to write a blog post and my website can be set free to the world. I have updated, edited, uploaded, resized and compressed everything I can right now. If you knew me better, some of you do, you would know that I am such a perfectionist. (It's a blessing and a curse as Mr. Monk says it wisely) (Off-subject: Monk is definitely in the Top 5 of my most favorite tv shows ever. I have been patiently waiting for Netflix, Amazon or Hulu to pick it up and release all episodes. I love Mr. Monk mostly because I am Mr. monk :-) If you have never seen it, I highly recommend watching it, and when you are watching it let me know where you found it will you!) - I am about to continue the sentence I interrupted a ways back, so you might want to re-read and leave the part about Monk out this time! - I am such a perfectionist therefor I keep working on things, and working on them, and working on them, or as I like to say with my textile art: "I keep adding buttons!" And that is exactly what I have been doing: adding buttons and hand stitching to my site!

I have been told by several people close to me that it is time to publish my website. "It is good enough!", they say. So after adding a few last minute pictures (Read: buttons) I have only one last thing to do and that is to write a "Welcome to my Website blog-post!" I have really enjoyed writing my 'About Me' and other pages but as far as blog posts, man I am stumped. What can I possibly write that people would want to read about? It is not like many exciting things happen in my life. I can't just make things up? Or can I?

My plan for this website has been to have one page with a collection of tabs, one place where you can find everything there is to be found about me. Either you are interested in my photography or my yoga classes. Heck maybe the only thing you are interested in is reading my awesome blog posts! Welcome! If you have any questions for me or if there is anything you want me to write about I welcome your suggestions. 

It has been a whirlwind of website creating over here. I have also been incredibly busy getting my yoga carreer off the ground. I guess I am definitely a child from the 80ies and older than I felt I was because I had not realized how much networking and social media are a big part of pretty much any job right now. As it stands I have five Instagram accounts, five Facebook pages, an Etsy shop, a blog, one website with a gazillion tabs and a family, dog and husband to keep happy! I am not sure how I am going to fit in the actual job of teaching yoga, taking families on photosessions and making art!

While my husband looks over my shoulders and asks: "That's all you wrote?" Very encouraging! "Yes, this is ALL I wrote! Are you kidding me :-) I am having trouble enough here with this blog! 

Let me tell you a bit about what my intentions with my blog are. As you noticed the blog is the page that opens up when you visit my site. This is done purposely because on my blog you will read or see what I currently am working on. My blog is going to be about Yoga, Photography, Art, unlike my site it doesn't have tabs to differentiate my passions. Everything is going to be right here and I felt that would be a good introduction to my page! My blog won't be boring without any pictures either :-) It will feature colorful photos like these:

Now see didn't this blog just get at least 30% better? These are not just photos I pulled out of my hat. You actually should see my iMac's desktop aka "my hat" right now. There must be at least 356 pictures on it and 35 folders that each contain another 100 photos each. (Organization has not been my strongest point in building this site!) In order for pictures to look good on any website it is recommended for them to be resized, you know so your page doesn't take 23 minutes to fully load. So mainly that has been my biggest task of late; to resize by hand every single picture on this site. I love my camera, don't get me wrong it is very nice, it is actually too nice, all my images are 60 mb at minimum, large enough to be printed on the side of a building and still be sharp, for this website they need to be closer to 1 or less than 1 mb.

Above pictures are the last ones that I added to my portfolio. These pictures are for an article that I wrote for Quilting Arts Magazine. I am not 100% sure how it happened but they reached out to me and gave me a task: "Can you make pet portraits on an 8 by 10?" "Sure!", I said, not knowing if I could actually do it. I do work better under stress and when someone gives me a specific task. If I work for myself I will work on things forever and ever and keep changing the direction I am going in.

On my blog, if I am not currently working on a project, I will highlight some of my older art projects and revisit them, telling you a little bit more about them. I am hoping all of this sounds incredibly interesting and totally awesome to you! :-) I hope you will follow my blog, laugh, maybe learn something, or be inspired yourself to create something new! I am here to answer any questions you might have! For now I am not adding any more buttons or hand stitching to my site, instead I will leave it alone and open up the floodgates! 

Fingers crossed!

Namaste,

XOXOXOXOXO Karin

Time to open up my website!

I think if I remember correctly it has been two weeks since I first purchased my domain name, or has it been three? I am honestly not exactly sure because I am sleep deprived after working on this website for the last 5 weeks. "Yes, the math doesn't quite add up!"  :-)  

Now this is a story in itself. I purchased karinwinter.com for the first time over fifteen years ago for the price of $20. Awesome! I created a little free Weebly website and things were great, for years and years. Until 2011 when you all know, if you have read previous posts, my daughter was born and everything I had been doing, I stopped doing. So sadly I forgot to update my current credit card information to my domain host and my domain expired. "No big deal", I thought, "Who else could possibly want this domain name?" I went back on my domain host website a few weeks later and you guessed it, my domain name of karinwinter.com was gone. Just gone. We tried to look and see who had purchased it, but the best they were able to tell me was "Someone in China." At this time I even paid some intervention   company $100 to approach the new owner to release the domain name back to me, to no avail. Well that's unfortunate but I let it go, I created another site karinwinter.photography. However, as my best friend recently told me: "Everyones knows that when you end a website in .org, .net or .photography it is only because .com is already taken and you are pretty much a looser :-)" Her words not mine! Regardless my website was fine for a bit until I completely let it go and didn't look at it for years. Until 2 years ago when I got an inkling to type in my name again and see if it had opened up. I searched my karinwinter.com and yes it was available! Great! I was pretty excited, because that is really the name that I wanted for my site. I kept clicking through some prompts until the cart showed up: KA-CHING: $6000. It was for sale for the astronomical price of six thousand dollars! Well "No way Jose!", I said and left the whole thing alone again. 

Fast forward to last week. I have been playing around with the idea of opening up a website again. I am steadily busy as a photographer and am now adding my yoga teachings to my services so I figured it would be a good idea to have a website again, a place to direct potential clients and students. This time I knew, as I am offering so many different directions: Yoga, Photography and Art not many names would work. I wanted my site to encompass all my passions. So here I go, I type my desired name in again, fingers crossed and it is for sale still. This time the price had dropped to $600. "Ok not bad", I thought, but still too expensive. 

So per my husbands advice I called the owner of the domain, funnily enough a company right down the road in Denver. I pleated with them, "Can we lower this price?" I am just a little ol' housewife with five kids, I am nobody famous, there is no way I can afford $600 right now. They held firm and would not lower the price, they didn't even care like a tiny bit, a resounding "No." What he could do however was offer me a payment plan, no fees, no interest, for the next year I would be paying $50 a month. I will not have complete ownership of the domain but I can use it and point it towards any web host I choose to build my site at. After my year is up, the domain will be mine once again! Now if only I can remember to renew it on time! ;-)

After midnight...

Hi friends!

It is a few minutes after midnight as I am sitting at my desk working on my website. Hopefully by the time you are reading this it will be mostly completed. For now, for me, it is a work in progress! I am about half way done and have spent countless hours, well actually I have been counting them: twenty-four. 

I knew making my own website would not be easy, sifting through 10 years of pictures on my computer is not an easy task. Especially when the total count of photographs on my hard drive sits at 92549! That's right friends I am a hoarder. I hoard photo's, the first step is admitting you have a problem, close to 100.000 pictures! Wow! That is with me actually sifting through and deleting here and there along the way. Whenever I can find a minute I go through my albums and delete the blurry, the duplicates and the plain ol' bad ones. 

As I mentioned before; my life was pretty much on track all the way up to my daughter was born. She is our fifth child. You know people always ask: "How do you do it? Five kids?" Well I was doing pretty good, still am, but the fifth one was the one that tipped the scales for me. Suddenly I was not keeping up with tasks that I had been before. For instance all my boys have scrapbooks from the day they were born. Guess when those books end? Yep, a few weeks before their sister was born. All photo's on my hard drive are organized and edited up to 2011. The last quilt I made? 2011. I can hardly remember the last time I read a book in its entirely.

Things are about to change. As my little 'Hot Potato', as I lovingly call her, starts her adventure in KG, I will embark on a huge task of getting all caught up again! It's kind of fun actually. I am looking at pictures I don't even remember taking. I would just dump them all on my iMac and never look at them again. So a trip down memory lane is what is in store for me. 

With all of my kids in school during the day, I will have time to rekindle old passions! Work on art projects, delve deeper into my photography business and my new job as a yoga teacher! So hang on just a minute longer as I am reorganizing my life. I have lots of awesome projects planned.

To prove that I don't know what pictures are on my computer I just randomly went back to November of 2012 and pulled this beauty! Good times at Costco! I don't remember this at all!

First Blog Post. Yay!

Hi friends! I am excited to start blogging once more. I started blogging for a while maybe 10 years back but then life happened: I had my fifth child and everything fell to pieces :-) I had a handle on it all the way up to four kids but for some reason I stopped doing everything that wasn't a necessity after my 'lil miss was born. No more blogging, journalling, scrapbooking, art making and cleaning (I kind of threw that last one in as a joke, however it is no joke). So as my little duckling leaves the nest this coming school year and starts her adventure in Kindergarten, I will be starting an adventure of my own. A return to me: the artist, the writer, the photographer, the yogini and I am taking you along for the ride! I hope you enjoy. 

These are some of the things we have been doing the last ten years: Exploring Colorful Colorado!