Wow, has it ever been busy around here!  I have lots of session images to catch up on posting.  Here are a couple from Janessa’s session.   The first is with her dog, Miley.

Some leaves that Ada and I picked up on a walk last Sunday.

We shot plenty of “normal” family portraits (where everyone is in focus), but I couldn’t resist some fun ones during the Thompson family session.  Here are a couple of favorites.

Here’s one of Ashley’s cheering and trophy pictures which I particularly loved along with one of Ashley’s casual outfits.

It’s always important to me to get a range of mood, expressions and styles in a session.   Here are a couple of images that I particularly loved from Noel’s recent session.   We’ll remove the braces from images that Noel chooses.

The most frequent comment I hear is about the eyes of my subjects.  Some people wonder what I’m doing to them (post-processing in Photoshop) and some people just think I’m obsessed with eyes.  My answers to those questions are “nothing” and “perhaps.”

I think the way eyes are lit in a photo makes a big difference in the mood of the photo.   And one thing I’ve always liked about natural lighting (if well done) is that the eyes tend to have a lot of light in them, so that the pupils are small and more of the iris shows.  In studio, typically, the pupils are larger, because it is more dim in the studio than in a natural light studio.  This leaves only a small rim of iris showing, and is the look most of us are accustomed to from school photos and traditional studio portraits, but not the way we generally see one another, thus some of the artificiality of studio lit portraits.  “Artificial” can be cool and different, so I don’t mean that in a bad way.

In the natural light studio, I can position the person so that their eyes are literally filled with light.  The effect is often dazzling, and I generally can’t help but comment on it.   So, yeah, maybe I am a bit obsessed.

Anyway, here’s an example from a recent session with Jordan in which I’m sure people will think I’ve done something to alter or amplify the color of his eyes, and which I assure you I did nothing other than make use of the sweet light in the natural light studio.

Ah let me count the ways I love the natural light studio.  First, the light is beautiful.  Second, it is air conditioned.

It was a pleasure meeting Kayla and her mother and Grandmother.  I doubt Kayla would call herself this, but looking at her medals and plaques, I’d call her a track star.  I wanted to do some motion pictures, so here’s one of my favorite images of Kayla running.

I love a good challenge. One of my challenges for myself this year is to not take any more boring sports pictures. While I love a lot of the sports pics I’ve taken in the past, there were some that I felt I was just duplicating what I’d seen done locally, what sports pics were “supposed” to look like, what clients who had only seen local work expected. This isn’t the way I shoot anything else, and so it bothered me. I’ve spent the past few months collecting ideas and studying imagery from photographers across the country (Montana, Idaho, Colorado, and Michigan to name just a few places) who shoot incredible sports pictures, who, I think, looking at their work, love sports pictures more than anything else they shoot. These photos and photographers have inspired me and I’m having a great time bring that inspiration to my work.

We shot Nathan’s football pictures in studio on a rainy day, but went out to the baseball diamond for some of his baseball pictures on a sunnier day. I think we got lucky with the clouds that day. Here’s one of my favorites from Nathan’s outdoor session.