We are very grateful to all of the athletes and performers who we have been privileged to photograph this year. May you all find new adventures and joys in 2012!

Thank you for a wonderful 2011! Roger and I have loved every minute with you on the beach, slopes and football field. We thank you for your dedication to your sport. To those who have ordered images this year, we thank you for your business and hope that the memories that you preserved keep the happiness in your heart whenever you see them.

Here's our holiday gift to you: Through Sunday, December 18 at midnight

• All orders shipped free
• All orders receive a complimentary digital file download of each image ordered
• Orders over $75 receive 10% off

Enter code HappyHolidays2011 at checkout.

Orders placed through 12/16 will likely arrive in time for holiday giving. Orders placed the 17th and 18th may arrive in time for holiday giving.

We wish for you a joyous holiday season filled with all the magic and surprises that the world has to offer. May your 2012 start with celebrations bright enough to light your way through the entire New Year.

With Thanksgiving just past and the warm glow of gratitude still warming our hearts, we looked for a way to say "Thank you" to you, our photographic subjects and our clients. Our appreciation for the way you give your all to your sport or art is beyond words, and we hope that our images let you see what we do when we photograph you.

This year's Muskego High School football team was amazing. Their season ended last Friday evening when they lost in the 2nd round of the play-offs. We are proud of the play and sportsmanship that we witnessed and honored to be their official photographers.

There is a lot of heart on the team. I think that the expression below from the end of the game speaks for their disappointment at the loss. Yet all I can think is CONGRATULATIONS! Well done.

Yes, King Arthur was in Muskego on Saturday at our very own PAC. And MindWorks was there capturing the drama.

For those of you who purchased books or the slide show DVD, the images that we've published are the ones from which we'll select. Little has been done to any of the images, especially cropping so the book and slide show will be even more awesome than the published photos.

If you didn't order a book or slide show and now wish you had, please email me and I'll get the information to you. Deadline is 8/26, so hurry!

Here are links to the galleries for the Dress Rehearsal and the Performance. Enjoy!

At tournaments we often hear that we must be able to live all year on what we make from Show Ski Photography. Since we just completed 4 tournaments in as many weeks, we've heard that a lot in the last month. I'd like to set the record straight. No bragging or complaining either, just the honest truth about Show Ski Photography.

Fact 1 - We do not get paid for creating the images! That's right, the tournament does not pay us to photograph like they do for the webcasting. We are on our dime (often taking vacation for my husband) and unavailable to our Image Dreams Studios portrait clients when we are on the beach photographing. (What a great office we have!)

Fact 2 - We photograph EVERY act of every show - rain, shine, cold, hot - EVERY act! We don't stop until you are done skiing.

Fact 3 - We pay our own travel expenses. Hotels and travel are all on us. Some tournaments allow us to eat at the venue at their expense - for which we are VERY grateful. And having dogs, we have the expense for their care when we are shooting tournaments.

Fact 4 - Last year was our biggest year, and after deducting the hard expenses (hotel, travel and dog care) we made 2 times what we spent. After deducting for the cost of the goods sold (paper and ink) our time was paid at a rate of less than 50 cents/hour - never mind profit!

Fact 5 - For promotional purposes, we donate to every team who asks. The donations we made last year totaled more than 10 times our gross sales.

Fact 6 - We have the most extensive library of publicly available show ski photos in the world. Spanning 7 years of State and National competitions with assorted team and invitational tournaments sprinkled in. We have been published in the state, nationally and in many team program books and calendars. Our 371,000+ show ski photos receive over one million hits per year.

Fact 7 - We have been told many times that our pictures are the best learning library available to show skiers - period. Our library of images has been called (many times) an "invaluable resource". And all of this is at no cost to the show ski community. (We pay for it in bandwidth, hard drives and all the other associated gear. Our PLEASURE!)

I believe that we are the best in the business, if not made wealthy by it.

In light of the above, we have been advised by our potential customers to lower our high prices, with the theory being that we will make up for it in volume. And this year our prices are a bit lower than last year - but not because of customer requests. (It has to do with the separation of our Portrait Photography business from our Action Photography business.)

So are we just stupid to put in the long hours for a wage that could be beat by "adding fries to your order"? Some think so. We wonder at the end of a tournament when the processing is just beginning. And in the final analysis, we're in it for the same reason you skiers are in it - we love it and believe in the family oriented values that it promotes while entertaining, being healthy for you (except for over indulgence in the beer tent - not that a show skier would ever do that) and being FUN.

Please don't mistake this information for a dissertation on the joys of not making a living. We welcome your orders as we do your viewing. We appreciate your business very much as it encourages and enables us to continue the work we've chosen.

Have thoughts on this blog post that you'd like to share? Please email Carol. We'll publish respectful responses!

Enjoy the photography! Start here: www.SkiPhotos.US!

After any event (sport or performing arts) there is a lag before the images are published. We are often asked if there will be any photos before we are able to get them online. So I thought I'd outline the process to help you understand what is taking "so long".

Step 1 - Review
Every photograph is reviewed "by eye" for focus, composition, and exposure. If either of the first 2 are bad, the photo is deleted. If the exposure is outside of my acceptable parameters, it is corrected. We keep about 95% of what we shoot. This step takes about 45 minutes for every hour of shooting. Eye fatigue is an issue in this step, so about every 2000 images I have to take a break and do the dishes, or the laundry or play with the dogs.

Step 2 - Generate JPG Files
For the best images, we shoot in the native format of our cameras. This format is called "raw". The internet cannot display images in this format so we export all the "keepers" as JPG files. This step takes about 30 minutes per 1000 images. No other work can be done on the computer processing the images because all of the computer's processor and memory are used for this task.

Step 3 - Copy to Our Web Server
We own and operate our own web servers. The image files, now in JPG format are copied to the server, which takes about 1 minute for each GB of data, and an average 1000 images is around 5 GB.

Step 4  - Publish the Images
We have written our own publishing routine that manipulates the images into folders, creates a searchable database of the folder and file names, and creates the thumbnails that you first see when you open an album. This can take 20-30 minutes per 1000 images.

Step 5 - Create Links (optional)
For the ski community, we create links to the published images by race or show, so that you can both easily jump directly to the event and so that you can tell where we are in the publishing process. (We publish in the order skied.)

Throughout the process outlined above, there are frequent backups of both the original files and the web files. The time and gear needed for that are the fodder for another blog post. ;)

For our show ski fans: for each 1 hour show we (2 photographers, Roger and Carol by name) shoot we spend another hour and 40 minutes to get it to the web. Let's round that up to account for "life" (answering the phone, letting the doggies out, etc.) keeping this from being a linear process to 2 hours per 1000 images. There were just over 28,000 images taken at D1 Nationals last weekend. That amounts to 56 hours to publish all of the images. Please note that sleeping, eating and personal hygiene are NOT optional, and add to the total time it takes to process!

Ski (water or snow) Fans - go to www.SkiPhotos.US to see the progress of our publishing and to find links to your event!

Hope this helps with the wondering whether we will make your images available. We will - it just may take a little time.

After 7 years of photography under the MindWorks Photography name we have come to recognize that we really have 2 businesses. So, we've been working for the past several months on how to focus on each one properly. Last month the new name and logo for our portrait division was completed and today we split our website into two websites.

This site, MindWorksPhotography.com will continue to serve all of our action photography clients and fans. Image categories you'll find here are sports (e.g. Water Ski, Snow Ski, Football, Baseball, etc.) and Performing Arts (e.g. musicals, and other performance art).

Portraiture will be handled by our new division: Image Dreams Studios. The web address for Image Dreams Studios is www.ImageDreamsStudios.com.

Fabulous images and warm customer service will continue to be our strength in both divisions. And now we will be able to focus everything from news to prices to products toward you in a more specialized way. Watch this blog for more information over the coming weeks. Check out our new Portraiture site, and when the time comes, join us as we celebrate the full arrival of our new division.

6/28 - All images are posted! Celebrate with us - Enjoy!!!!!

We are honored to be the Official 2011 Mercury Invitational Show Ski Tournament photographers! And today's shows were wonderful - as was the weather being the first day of sun in a-week-that-felt-like-an-entire-season!

To view the images and get the latest updates on our posting progress, please click here or go to SkiPhotos.US.

Enjoy!

Change is energizing! We've been contemplating a "divisionalization" of our services and now the design is nearly complete. So we're taking the first steps to making our exciting changes happen. The first change is the addition of password protection for all of our portrait galleries.

If you have images in any of these galleries;

• High School Graduates
• Portraits - People
• Portraits - Pets
• Weddings

...you'll now need a password to view your images. No worries - this is a simple task and we'll allow you to choose your own.

How to get your password set? Either email info@MindWorksPhotography.com or call 262.679.7900.  If you email us, please include your session date and let us know what password you'd like set. (We'll need the same information if you call.)

The images in these galleries are spinning off into our Portraits arm. Keep watching for other changes to update the look and feel of the portrait pages on our site, and to the new enhancements to our services that are on the way!