jeff, ashlee, and skylar – a family!
In late August, I shot a family portrait session for some friends of ours. Jeff was being deployed to Iraq and the family wanted some nice portraits done before he left. We met at the park one evening around sunset and had a fun time together.
Despite the late hour, Skylar was as cooperative as she could be, and we got some great images of the family together.
The pond at the park provided a great backdrop for a number of images. I just love her hand on her teddy bear in this one.
There were some amazing moments captured…
…but most of the time we were just goofing around and having a good time.
A few more of my favorites from the evening:
Godspeed on a safe return, Jeff! Thanks for all you’re doing for us over there.
on campus
This spring I had the chance to shoot family portraits for some friends of ours from around town. He’s a big K-State fan, so, in order to convince him to show up for the portraits, his wife said they would do the shoot on the campus of his favorite team!
We met there on campus and had a great shoot, starting with a location that they had spotted.
One of the locations I had scouted out previously was the old football stadium where they now hold a lot of intramural events. It’s always open and a very cool location to play with!
I was super excited to see that one of the tunnels leading onto the field was open.
Their daughter was the cutest little bug–she followed me around everywhere, just unleashing her adorable eyes on me, especially once I broke out the bribes candy.
In turn, I started following her around.
Thankfully, they were very open to some of my crazy ideas, especially because one of these turned out to be their favorite image from the session!
Thanks for such a fun session, you guys! You were a wonderful first family for me to shoot.
“7 years later” is semi-featured in jpg magazine!
If you’re not familiar with JPG Magazine, it’s a photography magazine by the masses. Anyone can sign up on the website, upload pictures, and submit them for consideration in various themes that might appear in future issues of the magazine. Website viewers can vote on whether they think a particular image is good for the theme in question, but the ultimate decision rests in the hands of the magazine editors. You can subscribe to the magazine and get it in your mailbox or buy them in most bookstores. You can also download every issue from their website in pdf format. It’s very cool.
One of the themes of the most recent issue was Family. Since I’m a family guy, I submitted a picture I took of us on our 7th wedding anniversary this past summer, appropriately titled 7 years later:
This image did not get selected for publication.
However, JPG Magazine just started producing outtakes: images that were cool enough to catch the editors’ attention but that, perhaps, didn’t quite fit the issue well enough. Or maybe they ran out of room for that theme. Or whatever.
The important point that I’m trying to make here, besides the fact that JPG Magazine is cool, is that my image above was included in the outtakes for the Family theme. You can get your own copy of the outtakes (I’m on p. 15 of the pdf) from JPG’s downloads page, along with pdf versions of whatever issues you’d like.
stacea: my first shoot. ever.
My very first shoot ever–as in, planned, set aside, executed–was for our babysitter. She was a senior in high school, nearing the end of the year, when we discovered that she hadn’t had her senior portraits done. I was wanting to try my hand at photography work, she wanted pictures done…it was an easy arrangement to make.
We shot most of the session at Wamego City Park around sunset. I really was just starting out, so most of the images are, in my opinion, passable, but nothing to scream about. I wanted to present a couple of the images from the session anyways, just to have a reference point to look back on to see progress.
So, here’s a couple of my favorites:
And this is the one she sent out as her graduation announcement:
