Brittany Booth is a good friend to Morgan and came out with her to help during Morgan’s session. We shot these pics of Brittany during part of Morgan’s session. This session was on the heels of a long rainy spell, and many rain reschedules, so the sky clearing felt like a gift, and I couldn’t help but shoot it as such.
Meet Jeannine and Tom. I met them last week and I think I have a crush on how they are as a couple. They’re just so great together. I love in love people! I know the context of getting a photo taken is a bit strange and stressful, because it involves giving someone permission to really look at you and your significant other, as the case may be. But when people can get past that and just be seen and just be together I always take it as a gift.
Tom and Jeannnie, thanks for spending some time with me, and I can’t wait for your wedding in Cobden, which is coming right up.
Last week I had the opportunity to shoot fashion in Chicago at a Shoot Fashion with Carlos Baez workshop. We had four models, a makeup artist, Rachel Frank Design along with her wicked outfits and styling and a beautiful natural light studio to work in. I loved it! I always love to see how other people shoot especially when they are some of the very best in the industry, as is Carlos. On this particular exercise I certainly felt the pressure of seeing eight photographers approach the same subject and setup, and trying to think if there was anything I had to say about the subject that was slightly different.
Here are a few images from the first setup. The shooting space was so lovely it made me feel lightheaded. And the model in these photos is a high school senior, Kaylee, so I was particularly delighted. What an incredible experience she had! I was so happy for her and impressed by how she did. As for my pictures, well I’ll like these images right up until I see something someone else or several someone else’s (lol) shot that blow my little pictures right out of the water. That’s why I figure I better post them now, before that happens.
I’ll post some from the other models a bit later. I’m still trying to choose which ones. We shot such a wide range of styles and setups, that I’m still a bit overwhelmed trying to figure out which ones I like best and why and what I could have done better.
The images in the first pair were shot with a tilt shift lens, which I’ve been experimenting with a lot lately, throwing parts of the frame out of focus to alter how it reads/feels. Fun stuff.
And a through the window shot, where Brittney reminds me of a an exotic mannequin butterfly.
And the smoky beauty Oleksandra.
Dad called me last week to tell me they were taking the old Spencer place down and asked me to come take a picture before they burned it. The Spencer house was one of the oldest houses around where I grew up, we think as early as Civil War time. Then it sat empty for a good sixty years in the field adjoining ours, so it was the main site of my first trespassing. I wasn’t a bad trespasser. I never wrote on the walls or damaged the place or left any indication I had been there. Mostly, I ratted around in the attic looking for interesting fragments from old Saturday Evening Post’s and wandered around looking out the windows like a ghost. It always felt, stepping into the house, that you might have just missed someone else stepping out.
I was glad to get to take Ada for a visit and to watch how she was just as enthralled with the place as I had been. Old houses like that have a kind of magic in them. When I think about all the abandoned houses I’ve known that are gone now, I wish I had photographs of them. I may have to take this on as a personal project, because as land prices rise, local farmers push to put every acre they have into production. As much as it bothers me, and it does, nostalgia doesn’t pay the property tax bill. Corn does.
The Summers-Kistler Funeral Home was one of the oldest, and grandest, buildings in Clay City. I happened to be driving past when they were bringing the last of it down, so pulled in to watch and take some pictures. I generally have one of my good cameras with me, but all I could find was one of my older cameras (2 years old as opposed to this year’s models), and worse, only two lenses, a 10.5 mm fisheye and an 85 mm. I had to laugh at this, because one I only use for novelty, due to the super wide distortion and the other is a portrait lens. But, shoot I did, with what I had, and here are a few pictures from the old funeral’s home last day.
As a photographer, I am a self-proclaimed workshop junkie. I go to a couple of photography workshops a year, like clockwork. And for the most part, I come home from my time with X,Y,Z Super So and So with a better understanding of what is so special about X,Y,Z, but no clearer idea of what it is that I have to bring to the table as a photographer. Workshops are great to learn things: shortcuts, money-makers, tips and tricks of the trade. But, they are, by nature more about learning to do things like someone else and less about finding a personal voice. There is no shortcut or photoshop action to get to that.
I set out for the Foundation Workshop with the “regular” workshop template in mind. I told people how excited I was to get to work with so many top wedding photojournalists from across the country. Getting to work with “them” was what I thought it was all about. And it was, but with a kicker.
At Foundation Workshop, participants are divided into teams and given individual assignments. They go out, shoot, and bring back their pictures to a room full of top photographers committed to providing guidance. The process is EVERYTHING at the workshop. Participants are pushed to their limits, where they find new territory for themselves as photographers. exploring how to express themselves better through THEIR pictures.
I keep hearing Huy say, “Your pictures are your voice. Make your pictures talk. Don’t be boring.”
I had the perfect team leader for me this year, Amy Deputy (if you feel up to having your heart broken, check out her slideshow on her blog), and the perfect team of mentors, Jay, Anja, Sergio and fellow team members, Erin, Marcin, Scott, Daniel. I was exactly where I needed to be and with the people I needed to be with, and for that, I am forever grateful. Life is not generally so precise.
I keep thinking, “Love and joy and excitement,” because that is what my Foundation Workshop experience felt like. My heart still feels a bit bruised, quite frankly, from feeling so much.
I know next year at the workshop will be different. And I expect the experience will be some whole new kind of wonderful. Whatever it is, I’ll be there with two camera bodies, three lenses a couple of flashes and my own particular way of seeing. My own particular way of seeing is still a work in progress, but far and away the best thing I found at Foundation this year.
The images below are some of my favorites from my assignment at the Sunstone Yoga Teacher Training Facility. I was reminded, working the images, of Amy’s comment during our team portrait session, “I see beauty. I see light.”
Yes, and Yes. Perhaps it was just the 101.3 degree room during the yoga class fogging up my brain and muddling my sensibility. But my time at Sunstone was spent basking in a collective radiance. Considering that the Sunstone participants are only four weeks into their 8 week intensive course (14 hours a day, 5 days a week), I can only imagine what they will be like at the end of their training. I wish that I could see them, because I know I would be dazzled. I felt privileged to spend time there and changed, in some quiet deep way that I haven’t figured out yet.
I do know, however, and honor, that my personal Foundation experience was forged as much from sitting in on Philosophy Class at Sunstone Yoga and sweating it out with the girls during their daily Fire Yoga classes as it was from editing photos back at the hotel. Many things said at Sunstone rang true to me, chief among them, “Change your thoughts and change your reality.” That is a pretty tall order for any workshop, anywhere, with any group of people, but that comes closest to describing what Foundation Workshop was like for me.
I am headed out tomorrow to Dallas to something called the Foundation Workshop. This is a hands on workshop conducted by some of the top photojournalists and documentary wedding photographers in the country. Unlike any other photography workshop I’ve ever been to, this workshop I shoot a story assignment, and the instructors/mentors critique.
When I signed up for this thing, nearly a year ago, this sounded like the greatest idea ever. The closer the workshop has come, the more I’ve questioned my decision-making ability. The last couple of days, I’ve more or less classed myself as insane. I think this might be anxiety, but the jury is still out on that. 
At this point, all I really know is that these people, apart from being excellent, are also nice. They mean well. They believe, passionately, in what they are doing. I’m going to have to repeat this to myself like Dorothy chanting, “There is no place like home.”
I also know that once I’m there, I’ll be fine, relieved actually. I’ll be free from imagining every possible bad and boring photo I might possibly take and have the liberty to just SHOOT the bad and boring photos and move on to something possibly more interesting. The power of positive thinking!
So, who are these people, my wedding photography heroes? The first is a list of the teams and a bit about the workshop. The second link is a website of several wedding photographers I admire, many of whom will be there.
Wish me luck and vision. I’ll have to provide my own courage. And the best part of all of this is that I’ll come back a better photographer.
I just got home from the 2009 SPA Event in Vegas. SPA stands for Senior Portrait Artists, and let me just say that these people rock. Part of the event included going around to see different shooters setups and to shoot some images with different lighting styles, etc. using SPA models who are highschool seniors.
I loved the lighting setup on Sean’s image on the right and hope to incorporate it this year. And Whitney, on the left, as a dancer modelled beautifully.
Overall, I got to see a range of shooting styles that I love, and it was fun to be around other photographers who are not willing to settle for boring. It is going to be a great and very fun year for area seniors. I can’t wait! Watch for details on my 2010 model search which I will be launching very soon on Facebook.
The Flora Garden Care Center on Shadwell Street (behind No More Nicotine Club) is having a Haunted House Thursday evening from 6-8 p.m. and Friday evening from 6-8 p.m. The Haunted House has been designed and sponsored by Nita and Rita Noblet as a fund raiser for the activities department of the nursing home. This is not your regular, “Boo!” Haunted House. This is one (empty) wing of the Nursing Home, a long Hallway of Horrors, with vignettes from just about every scary movie you’ve ever seen in every open doorway.
I don’t want to spoil the surprises, but here is a small sampling of some of the characters that await you at the Haunted House.
I had the great pleasure to some time with Andrea and to take photographs for her new yoga studio in Salem, Illinois. Here are a couple of my favorites.
