Chloe

Oh, blog! I have been such a terrible updater! To be fair, it’s been a fairly lively month. I’ve attended conventions, festivals, fairs, concerts. I’ve ridden on 80 year old tractors and put up Christmas trees (yes, already).

In the midst of the business, I was able to do a lovely senior shoot with Chloe.  It was a perfectly sunny (if not a bit hot) day, and we took advantage of many different settings for a variety of looks.

The sun was way high in the sky early into our shoot, which made for some tricky (and painful to the eye!) lighting situations, but I HAD to use this chair before we left for the other locations.  I’ve been dying to use it in a shoot for a while now. Thanks for being a good sport and humoring me!



LOVE the fact that she busted out the Cowgirl hat and boots. It’s a look that never goes out of style!

One of the local forest preserves provided a lot of picturesque backdrops.  The bokeh in the two photographs above really make for a pleasant effect, I think.

For the final portion of the shoot, she changed into a cute dress with the boots and hat and we walked to a little wooden fence within the park.  What I didn’t even realize, after all these years, is that the fence actually partitions off a field for flying model airplanes. And yes, people were flying them. And staring at us. We shot anyway, though, and I’m glad we did!

Senior shoots are a lot of fun – it feels less like “working”, and more like “hey, let’s go model!”. It’s great to have a relaxed, one-on-one session, Chloe certainly made things easy for me. I hope she enjoys the pictures as much as I do!

Tom & Jess – June Wedding

I’ve been wanting to talk about this wedding for a few weeks now, but I also wanted to give the bride and groom the first chance to look at their own pictures. I can’t bring myself to have my clients see more than one picture from one huge day out of context! Now that they have the pictures in their possession, allow me to show a few of my favorites from the day – it was hard to narrow it down. I’ve been very lucky with the vast majority of the weddings I’ve shot: the brides and grooms have been extremely relaxed and willing to roll with the punches, as it were, and this day was no exception. On to the photos!

So very Generation Y of us

I don’t always do a “ring picture”, honestly. I do appreciate details (I have to), but while I was in Jess’ changing room, I looked around and noticed her Super Nintendo next to the TV, still sitting there after all these years. I knew what I had to do.

The dress, of course.

The dress’ details – very elegant.

There have been a few times in the past when I’ve had the opportunity to drive from point A to point B with just the bride. I really like these moments, and it was especially surreal this time, given that Jess has been a good friend of mine for many years. I’ve ridden in this car more times than I can remember. It could have been just like any other car ride in high school, hitting up Beef-a-roo after playing in the marching band at the football game, or taking a drive to Aldeen park to spend the afternoon. But this time we were driving to the wedding venue, is all.

When it comes to photographing “the dudes”, I find it most enjoyable to let them do their thing. When I’m not getting candids of them goofing off, I’ll usually just say, “Wait, stop what you’re doing, and look at me!”, and boom.  The resulting pictures are, to me at least, much more fun and evocative of their personalities.

The Best Man takes a shot; hilarity ensues

The groom is holding a basketball!

This photo is one of the biggest reasons why I love standing back and letting things unfold. I did NOT tell them to do this, but when they decided to try to hang up their jackets for optimal B-balling, I freaked out (in a good way). All of the jackets ended up falling on the ground when I tried to remove a lone towel from the line, but I still managed to snap a few fun photographs.

boutonniere pinning: a lost art

Did anybody around my age ever actually learn how to do this? Because I sure didn’t, and it just looks confusing.

A little piece of the past on the bride's bouquet

group hug

Immediately after the ceremony, I found the wedding party in a group hug; it was adorable, and I could feel the love and excitement. And there was LOTS of excitement.

The personal attendant of the bride, looking beautiful.

So we all piled into the limousine and rode down the street to the park for pictures. We weren’t the only wedding party there, either!

Taking advantage of the different scenery…

This is probably one of my favorite child candids I’ve ever taken. What is it she’s looking at? One of her balloons got loose and flew away, leaving a priceless look on her face.

d'awww

 

There was much celebrating afterward, great food, and great dancing. It even marked my first experience with eating Mexican food at a wedding reception (me likey!). It was a great joy to be a part of this day from start to (nearly) finish. I hope that Tom & Jess and the rest of the family are enjoying the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them!

fun with lighting

I recently (finally) invested in a remote for my camera. As such, I’ve been doing some quick self-portrait experiments with lighting, using my Gary Fong Power Snoot and flashes. I don’t play around with artificial lighting enough, but when I do, I enjoy it. We dabbled in using quartz lighting and the Speedotron flash system in college, but in the mindset of just wanting to get assignments done, I didn’t always use it to its full potential. Lighting is probably the most complicated part of the photographic process, and yet it is the very basis of photography itself. You don’t learn it overnight.

So far, I’m really liking the intensity of the light that the Power Snoot creates. I can place it very close to the subject (me), and the output is not too harsh on my skin.

My favorite part of using lights/flashes is trying to get a more dramatic outcome. While the flash is somewhat centered on my face here, it’s very specifically directed onto it, creating a bit of a spotlight effect.

In playing with Nikon’s nifty built in flash system, I also discovered the joy of using one of my flash slaves to illuminate a non-subject element of the photograph.

In this picture, I’ve got the snoot-ed flash camera left, with another flash behind me, illuminating one of the guitars and the Abbey Road poster.

Here’s one I thought was really fun. How adorable is a map as a backdrop? Once again, I lit the background behind eddy, and placed the other light very sharply to his right.
I’ve got a lot (and I mean a LOT) of learning/investing to do when it comes to lighting, but experimenting in my own time like this is a good start and a fun diversion.

summer family photographs

Last month, on a warm, overcast Saturday evening, I met with a family at a local park to shoot off a round of good ole family portraits.  Side note: I’m noticing a weather trend with all of my  photo sessions; it doesn’t matter if every other day of the week brings sun. The clouds will come when it’s time to take pictures. Booooo. Luckily, that didn’t keep us from getting some precious pictures.

Man, chairs are a useful prop. And I love what it does to kids when introduced into a somewhat incongruous environment. Chair in classroom? Meh. Chair in wooded park? MUST SIT IN IT.

What a great looking family! Once we got the smiles coming, we were in business. Patience (and persistence ) definitely pays off.

great looking family, or greatest looking family?

Humans make so many emotive expressions, why limit photographs to the smile?

I think this might be one of my favorite photos from the whole set – so much personality  (and momma love). Sometimes the restlessness of a child can really work to a photograph’s advantage.

 

Looking back: College

Just for the thrill of it, I thought that I’d look back at some of my work that I did (was forced) to do throughout my four years in college. I figure that I’ll draw this out for a few posts, because while some of the stuff I did was all right, much of it was incredibly comically bad, in my opinion. There’s something about the feeling of putting out good photos with a figurative gun to the head that generally makes me crumble under pressure. If my life depended on it, I would be so dead.  It’s probably mostly my fault, in a roundabout way, for not wanting to put the extra effort into turning in good pictures, but it’s way, way easier to blame it on things like juggling classes, the weather (and it seemed like the weather sucked 90% of the time that I had to be shooting), and my lack of inspiration by the constraints of the assignment.

If there was one photography class that I excelled the most in, it was definitely digital photography, probably because I was confident that I could manipulate the camera itself into making the image look good – more so than I would a film camera. I enrolled in it for the Fall 2007 semester, the beginning of my sophomore year.
The second assignment we did in this class was a study of water. Literally anything, as long as it included or rather overtly related in some way back to water. That’s fine. I put out some incredibly original photographs, like this:

It looks like a you-know-what

and this:

Hair. on my legs.

Before eventually hitting on something a little more intriguing with this:

That's right, y'all. In the shower.

Lots of questions with that one.

And then there was an assignment where we had to illustrate a phrase of some sort via photograph. I’d always enjoyed simple computer manipulation, so I decided to duplicate myself and do a take on the Beatles’ “Two of Us”.

The faces of two very clever people

I think I was probably the most proud of my final project in that class, where, after changing my mind a few times, I settled on a study of the “landscape” (manscape?) of Eddy. I shot his hair, his face, his toes, his neck and shoulders, and ended up with some soft and delicate photographs.

What a guy.

Well, stay tuned. I think pretty soon here we’ll take a look at some of the doozies I actually spent the time hand developing and printing.

Wedding-ness

I’ve been awfully busy editing photos. On the 11th of June, I had the pleasure of shooting a close friend’s wedding. Despite another overcast day, it was a great time, and I’m sure the two of ‘em are as excited to see the photographs as I am to edit them! Stay tuned.

cute, old signs

I shot a wedding yesterday, and I’m going to be engrossed in the editing process for a while, but I thought that for the fun of it I’d show a few photographs from a project I took on for a friend. It took me to the less glamorous parts of town (as if anything within a 50 mile radius is particularly glamorous), to capture some of the coolest business signs of yore in the area.

So, portraiture is kind of my “thing”, and as such, I thought this would be a good opportunity. Mainly to get out of the house, but also to ~expand my horizons~.

My biggest struggle was managing the environment itself. I’m somewhat limited to a bit of parking lot and sidewalks in terms of safely positioning myself to get a shot.  In addition to that, I have this thing about drawing attention to myself when I’m taking pictures in a public space: I kind of hate it. On an incredibly sunny day when my scrawny self with flaming red hair is walking along a busy street taking pictures of whatever, people look (and “woo” at me from their cars, ew). As I was about to cross a side street, a car turned right onto it, and some classy looking woman (not really) having a smoke outside of one of the neighborhood bars warned me not to get hit. Lady, I lived in Chicago for four years on and off – I’ve dodged my fair share of traffic. I think I got this. Just let me take my pictures, okay?

As I began the post-editing process I had, in my mind, a vague description as to how I wanted these photos to look. The word that kept popping into my head was “candy”. I wanted them to look so sweet that they appeared edible (but not really, obviously).

Then there was the city’s symbol. Does anybody actually know what this thing means? It’s really phallic and probably represents hope, or something really vague like that. That’s about all I really know about it.  But it was a good challenge to try to find some interesting compositions within the sculpture itself. I just wish I hadn’t tired myself out by stupidly parking a mile away from it and walking. It was hot and this girl right here was wearing black pants.

A City Wedding

How do you sum up an entire day’s worth of events into a few photographs? I’m about to give it a try, but I don’t think I’ll do the day justice. Last month, I had the pleasure of shooting my first (and hopefully not last) Chicago wedding. My dear friend’s sister was getting married, and I was honored to be asked to photograph the day. The night before a big day like this, I go through various phases of freaking out. There are a lot of opportunities for failure for a wedding photographer, even with advantage of technology. The one thing that looms in the back of my mind is the fact that there are no do-overs in a wedding.

Fortunately, Mike & Alexandra’s wedding day went smoothly from start to finish.

seeing each other for the first time

I loved watching the way the two of them interacted with each other, and I especially loved being in such interesting spaces to watch them interact within. The hotel (Hotel Allegro) was beautiful.

traditional for traditional's sake

Mike & Alex were both on the ready to be playful as well as super traditional in our portraits. The setting also helped tremendously in this regard. I saw these chairs near the lobby and thought it was a good spot for our super old fashioned bride and groom portrait.

I learned a lot when we ventured out of the hotel into the unrelenting weather that afternoon. I learned that cold rain feels pretty okay when exiting a hot car.

I learned that I should always remember to pack that little lens hood for my 50mm lens.

And I definitely learned to appreciate unpredictable weather as just another element to a photograph. I think the umbrellas are a nice touch.

The point where I began to resemble a drowned rat

Did I mention we were in Millennium Park? Because we were – and I have to say, if you ever want to feel like a minor celebrity for a few minutes, visit the bean for your wedding photos. I felt more like a member of the paparazzi at that point.

Mmmmm.

This was definitely the only wedding day that I’ve shot that included stopping for a quick cookie at the bakery. Incidentally, the bakery was working on Mike & Alex’s wedding cakes as we stopped in.

Happily married!

I could have posted many more photographs, but I have to stop somewhere! Of the many weddings I’ve attended, this one was truly among the loveliest. I’m really glad that I got to be a part of this day.

Picnicking

Hey, everyone. So I’ve had (and still have) a Flickr, I’ve had various types of journals, I’ve got a Facebook, but I’ve never once attempted a “photo blog” of sorts. I guess it’s because I always felt I lacked “authority” to “showcase” my photography in a public forum. But now I feel more like I’m missing out than anything. For those that don’t know, my Bachelor degree is in (is that how you say it? “in”?) photography. Well, it’s actually in studio art, but going around and saying I have a Studio Art degree seems to imply that I can paint or draw, and I really can’t; that’s probably why I did the whole photography thing (Also: I’m a fool).  Anyway, this will probably be good for me, so, cutting to the chase…

Eddy and I went to the local state park this past weekend for a picnic. It’s rare that I willingly venture out in the outdoors for fun (my skin is somewhat translucent) but it was the perfect day to do so.

(one for the foot fetishists)

I made Eddy photograph me in the classic “laying down from the side” pose.  Naturally, I made him pose afterwards.

The park was full of like-minded people, and some people on a sailboat.

I can’t think of anyone I’d rather buy Jimmy John’s and faux-picnic with.  I’m speaking, of course, about Eddy, not myself.  A+++++++++++++ would picnic with again.