I love it when other people have great ideas.  It makes my job so much easier.  Lol.  Cassandra loves the forties and fifties and wanted to do something vintage.  She suggested the soda fountain at Bailey’s Flower Garden on the square in Louisville.  I thought that was a great idea, especially because Cindy Bailey is in the process of transforming Bailey’s Flower Garden into a neat coffee shop up front where I will soon be displaying many client images.  It’s going to be cool.  I think grand opening is going to be sometime in the first week of June.  I’ll update this with the correct date and add some images of the photo display, shop redo, etc. ANYWAY, here is Cassandra’s retro pic.  Great idea, Cassandra, I love the pics!  And the cherry coke from the soda fountain was excellent!  Thanks, Marcy!

Tiffany Slankard Cowger started discussing a big family picture with me last fall, but fall is crazy and overbooked and the weather fell apart on us before we could schedule something.   We tried again for spring, and thankfully the weather held for us.  Tiffany’s sister Gwen and her family came in from Millstadt and Tiffany’s brother and sister-in-law, Billy and Leslie came over from Olney.  Tiffany’s parents live in Clay City, so they didn’t have far to travel.  All the kids were very fun, and Dallan showed great patience, since they were heading to his birthday party after pictures.

I enjoyed spending time with everyone.  Here are a couple of the big group photos, one serious, one for fun.

Here’s some from Abby and Ayden’s session yesterday.  Ayden is such a sweet boy!  After several reschedules due to rain, we finally, finally got some sunshine.

Cassandra is getting extra pictures in her initial blog post for being such a sweet and goofy “art vision victim,” namely for risking being carried off by mosquitoes out in the field with the yellow rocket.   Thanks, Cassandra!  And looking forward to the second half of your session.

And, below, goofiness.  What you do when Off isn’t quite cutting it.

As promised, here are a few of Kelsea’s favorite images from her senior session, most of which are already on Facebook and printed as wallets.  Kelsea was great to work with.  Thanks, Kelsea!

And now for a few pictures from our insanely cute department.  I present:  Sophie.

I got to see Grant again, which is always a highlight.   Grant has become a super fast crawler and displays a lot of spirit.  The outside picture the wind was gusting 20-30 mph, which might have bothered a lesser baby, but not so Grant.  He seemed to just find it amusing to which I say,   “Go, Grant, Go.  You’re going to be a great one.  I can just tell.”

I blogged one image from Victoria and one from Kelsea’s session a couple of weeks ago, but now that they’ve chosen their favorites in their orders, I want to show a couple of those because they are a good example of the range I like to cover in a senior session.   First, Victoria’s close-up.  Then an artsy dress shot that I loved, and she chose one similar to, then Victoria’s ballet collage.

I like to cover a lot of ground in senior sessions, literally and figuratively.   I encourage a range of clothing from casual to dressy and shoot in three different environments:  my natural light studio (first image below), outside and the strobe studio.  I never know which environment or studio is going to be the best for a client until I work with them and get a sense of their personal style.  The natural light studio feels like a living room with beautiful light.  It is comfortable and a very easy place to relax.  The strobe studio is fun to try something more dramatic or playful.   I love shooting outside, and have found that between outside and the natural light studio people tend to look most like themselves.

Overall, I strive to de-stress the picture process every way that I can, to help make it a great experience for my clients as well as getting great images.   My head is full to the rafters of technical mumbo-jumbo about how to get the best possible pictures, but when a person shows up, my number one concern and focus is my subject as a person.   That is both what interests me and where I believe good pictures come from:  human interest backed up by enough skill and equipment to get the picture.

Next up, some of Kelsea’s selections.

I think I set a new personal record for number of images shot in a single portrait session with Kaydee.   She was so great about being game for looking for different locations and different shots.  Thanks, Kaydee!  Here’s one I particularly loved from our walk down the dirt road.

I’m posting senior session images first on my Facebook business page these days, so have already posted this image from Hanna’s session there.  We had a beautiful day to shoot last week, so we shot a lot outside before coming back to shoot in the natural light studio and strobe studio for a whole range of looks.  We had fun, and Hanna did great!  Can’t wait to show them all of their pictures on the big screen in studio hopefully later today.