BOSTON CHILDREN'S PHOTOGRAPHER, BOSTON FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHER, BOSTON NEWBORN PHOTOGRAPHER

This week marks an incredibly important time in my life.  It is my last week at IBM.  After 13 years of an incredibly wonderful career, I have resigned and on Friday I will turn in my Thinkpad for good.  I’d love to say I have mixed emotions, but I don’t.  I am completely and totally thrilled to be making this move, it is the right decision for me and I have waited and planned and thoughtfully executed.  I am done.

That said, I’ve loved my job almost all of the time I’ve been there.  I started in February of 1997 not knowing what I was in for.  I managed Customer Service for Lotus.  I worked incredibly long hours, pulled all-nighters, and formed a good deal of my work ethic that I still have today and will carry with me when I leave.  I worked with Ellen (C) and for Ellen (G) and can’t even put into words what they taught me as friends and mentors.  I had a lot of fun with the crew up on 4E in North Reading.  Gary, Stella, Heather, Jean, Lyndsey, Tina… I hate naming names because I already know right off the bat I am not mentioning everyone who was so near and dear to my heart and so I apologize for that.  We accomplished a lot in that group… we moved from a small local center to managing Customer Service for North America complete with outsourcing to an ibm.com center (unheard of in those days!).  It was incredible.

I moved into the education group in the fall of 2000 and went through yet another series of similar transformations.  Under the guidance of Crystal, and along side my dear friend Julie, and a very talented staff of managers and team leads, we joined multiple individual education sites into one national (now global) virtual center.  I had once again, so many dear friends… Kindra, Doaa, Shari, Erin, Carol, John B, Tony, Tom G, Kerry… “the Eds” from the LP side… again, too many names to name, so worried I’ll leave something off the list.  Melody (the Doctor is in).  I will never, ever forget the beautiful wedding shower everyone threw for me at the offsite — so amazing to have had friends and colleagues with such generous hearts.

In 2005 I began to focus on the migration to Learning@IBM and once again participated in an incredible transformation.  Long hours, odd hours, new team members… about 15 months delayed, but the final project was an incredible success.  Hours spent with Pam, strategizing, planning, whining… she talked me down from many a ledge.  AJ, Avis, Jeroen, David, Libby, Jason, Paul, Tim, Terry, Viv,  the entire LMS team.  In that transition I had the pleasure of learning from Vonnie who helped me greenlight the GLRT.

With the GLRT came a number of new challenges, successes, headaches and laughs.  Helping me through that was Jonas, Michael, Ron, Ron, Jim, Eric, Carrie, Chris, Stan, Ernie and Bill.  Another transformation that people thought would take weeks, but getting it right took months, and quite possibly years.  A project that I can’t take full credit for, but am incredibly proud of.

The last year or so has been spent supporting Vonnie’s infrastructure for Learning Delivery, working for Cynthia, alongside her wonderful team — Angela (my new partner in crime), Jim, John, Melody, and Pat.

In every single job role, and during every single year, I actively participated in major transformational changes of how we do business.  I am constantly amazed when I look back and think “we never, ever took a break.”  But that’s what I thrive on, and it’s how I have excelled and built my own business… build a distinct brand, become the best you can be, deliver exceptional value because that means more than being a low cost solution, give back where you can, develop those around you to bring the marketplace to a higher level and evolve before the world passes you by.

So with that, Farewell IBM, I wish you well.

Many, many more to come.  This is proofed on my laptop, colors could be crazy, but I promised her I’d post just one…

This session was one of them.  Kacie did a lot of advance planning with me to make this session happen for her family, and for her daughter’s first birthday.  And wouldn’t you know it, the day arrived and it was gross and rainy and dark.  We were sort of hesitant to reschedule because who knows what November can bring weather-wise, but we took a gamble on pushing it out one week and we hit the jackpot!  It was chilly, but not so much that faces were red… it was windy, but just enough to give Kaycie’s hair this awesome lift (this is where I pipe in that I drag huge fan around to make mom’s look like wella-balsam wind blown… and if you don’t know what that is, that should tell you that I am pretty old).

Anyway, the day was awesome, the family was awesome and I really had a great time hanging out with them, learning about their lives, blabbering mindlessly about mine (they humored me).  I think my mother-in-law thought I was a little crazed last night because I just kept saying “Really  Robs, I love my clients… I do… I love them all… really, I love my clients…”  I will say it once and say it again, I am really, really fortunate to be doing this and to meet such cool people that feel like old friends.

So that’s that… check out how seriously cute this little girl is.  I am not joking, just look at her eyes!  Love!

I can’t believe I forgot to blog this.  Well, I sort of can, because I have about 6 sessions from the fall that I never blogged… but I actually had this one ready to go about 30 minutes after I shot it.  And then I forgot to blog it.  Back on track… these little boys were the sweetest little twin babes you could imagine… I think maybe 12 days old?  But still oh-so-sleepy and oh-so-good.   This session was really fun for a few reasons (1) I spent a lot of time drooling over the most fabulous farmhouse these two boys will cause trouble in, (2) I like their mom, (3) it took me less than 2 minutes to drive there, and (4) Terri Lee helped me the entire session!  It was so fun having her with me and as much as you might think she and I would get sidetracked talking and what-not, we actually worked really well together and she helped me figure out a bunch of shots!  She’s welcome any time.

Back to the boys, I don’t care if I have to beg, plead, kick and scream… I am coming back to photograph these boys for life.  I already have so many ideas for when they can sit, crawl, run, chase each other, and… RIDE!  Carolyn, thank you for having me over!  I am so sorry I forgot to blog these!

I had a really awesome Saturday.  Owen was a rock star and handled the kiddos all day while I shot three sessions.  Usually I am totally overwhelmed shooting three sessions and I am pretty blurry eyed by the end of the day, but for some reason, it was easy!  Must be because I was looking at such beautiful people all day long.  Yes, not to disappoint, I seemed to have stumbled upon yet another crop of beauties, pretty people, scrumptious children, what-to-wear examples… you know the drill.

I met up with Deb first.  I am so glad we were able to work it out with our schedules, considering the disaster that my schedule is.   Deb is new to town and I was really excited to shoot these for her.  I know it can be so hard being far away from your homegirls, especially around the holidays.  You meet people, but it’s not like you know them well enough that you can just stop by their house, dump your kids, open their fridge and pour yourself some wine… (except that I think I did that the first day I even went to Stephanie’s house, but that’s another story).   And even though I know Deb has met a ton of girls, it’s still not quite home for her yet.  So I am hoping that by showing her these images, she’ll be a little more excited about her transition up here and will feel just a little bit more like it’s home when she sees them on her walls.

Sophie and Mia are so pretty, and they had on the cutest outfits, and they were really well behaved.  What is it with everyone’s kids being so well behaved and mine just seem to get better and better at throwing tantrums?   We ventured a little further back than I normally go and I absolutely LOVE the images of the girls in their dress up clothes in front of the country estate… it just seemed to work so well!

Enjoy!