Good Stock Photos

Happy Monday, friends! I hope you had a good weekend. I spent mine indoors, getting my home office in order. Last week I worked mostly from the couch and, let's be honest, from my bed, and that was not terribly productive. But today I'm starting fresh with my newly rearranged and organized office, and I'm ready for the week! 

Part of my goals for this week are getting my editorial calendar set up for the blog (I've fallen woefully behind) and part of that includes finding good photos for every post. If you do much writing online you know the struggle that is finding decent photos to go with your posts and articles. I do try to take photos on my own, but usually I don't have time to take photos for everything I write. So I often rely on stock photos.

My go-to stock photo option has long been Death to Stock Photos. They have some great stuff. Unfortunately, everyone else seems to think so as well! I see their photos everywhere, and I'm starting to realize it may be time to find another option.

Enter GoodStock.Photos. All photos on the site are free, but if you want the really good stuff you'll want to sign up for a membership. There are two options: Plus and Premium. Plus Members get a pack of 20 hi-res photos each month while Premium Members get the same pack plus access to all previous monthly packs. Both paid options also give back to the community, with $1 of every Plus Membership and $10 of every Premium Membership going to charity.

Good Stock Photos is relatively new, so there is only one photo-pack so far. But it's a good one, so I'm excited about the future of this site! Here are a couple of the photos offered in the current photo pack:

If you're interested in joining GoodStock.Photos, I've got good news for you. You can save 25% off a Plus or Premium Membership with the code "sparkles" - just enter that in when you checkout and you'll be good to go! The code is valid until July 31st, so if you're interested you better head over there now!

What are your go-to stock photo options? I know a few photographers who are also looking to put together their own stock photo sites, and I'd love to have a few places to pull from!
 

Previously on Mrs Robbins Sparkles...

Full disclosure: I did receive a one-year Premium Membership to Good Stock Photos in exchange for writing this blog post. However all opinions are my own! I am excited to be trying out Good Stock Photos, and I think you'll like it too.

Friday, I'm in Love: Blue Elephant Photography

I know I've said this before, but I LOVED our wedding photographers. They are based out of Stillwater, Oklahoma and they are wonderful! Kristine & Scott Redekopp are a husband and wife photography team that go by Blue Elephant Photography. My sister actually used them for her engagement photos and I loved their vintage look. So a couple years later when I was planning my own wedding, I knew we had to use them!

We ended up meeting up with them for coffee when they were in the OKC area, and I liked them as much in person as I did from their blog. So we booked them for our engagement and wedding photos!

The engagement session was awesome. We were super worried about the weather. It rained all morning, but thankfully it cleared up before we started! That was also the day OU kicked Notre Dame's butt on the football field, so it was a pretty great day overall :)

If you want an example of how great Kristine & Scott are, look at this photo.

It looks so good! You would have no idea that the area around that barn actually looked like this.

So yeah, that impressed us! They also process their photos pretty quickly, and within weeks we had this adorable personalized USB full of photos. To see more photos from our engagement session, head to their blog.

Based on that engagement session, I knew our wedding would be amazing. And it was! We were in communication in the months leading up to the big day; they provided a suggested timeline based on what we had planned and I incorporated it into our overall schedule. And they drove down for the rehearsal to get a feel for the lighting of the church (and the strictness of our priest!)

Kristine & Scott arrived on Saturday morning ready to go. They took pictures almost from the moment they arrived until the moment we started breaking down the tables at the reception. I'm sure they were exhausted (& probably starving!) But they never showed it. They were always right there with a camera in hand. And I'm sure that's why they captured all these amazing little moments:

I love having these photos that show the behind the scenes part of our wedding day. All the traditional pictures are great, but these remind me of how much fun we had leading up to those big moments too.

Really y'all, I can't speak highly enough of them. I was super stressed out by some last minute issues, not to mention the crazy high winds, but they worked with the situations we had and rocked it. For example, I pretty much refused to go outside in the wind before the ceremony because our hair stylists had already left and I didn't want my hair to look bad! So even though they'd planned to shoot our photos outside, we ended up doing them in the hallway of the church. The photos turned out fabulous anyway! Plus, they are super fast with their turnaround. We got a sneak peek while we were still on our honeymoon, and within a couple weeks we saw even more photos on Facebook and their blog. We received a USB drive with all our edited photos a little more than a month after the wedding, and it came in an adorable wooden box with some bonus prints!

And within three months, we had our photobook! It turned out amazing, of course. 

To see more photos, check out their blog post of our day. And if you or someone you know is getting married, seriously consider them. And let them know I sent ya :)

Meet Winchester

I'd like to introduce you to Winchester (or Winnie, as I call him). He is a blue heeler/Australian shepherd mix that my husband and I have had a little over a week now!

Last week we made the 45 minute trek out to a local Twitter friend's home (Fun Fact: we bought our living room rug from her, too!) and picked up this cute little boy. J and I have been talking about getting a dog for months. We'd planned on adopting one from a shelter - I adopted my cat from a shelter in Dallas back in 2008 and I totally recommend adopting over buying - but this friend's dog wound up having lots of puppies about 9 weeks ago. So instead of going to a shelter, we decided to make one of those little cuties ours!

It's been a bit of an adjustment to say the least. This little puppy is wonderful. He's always super happy to see us, even if we just stepped inside for a minute. He is friendly and excited and pretty stinking cute. 

He's learning some basic tricks like fetch right now. He's getting pretty good at it, unless he gets distracted by something shiny :) 

Just look at that face, y'all. He's pretty awesome!