Portraits in the snow

Yesterday morning I took the kids out in the snow for some playtime in the falling snow. This time, I took my DSLR camera and used my rain shield for the first time to protect it. The shield worked beautifully, and I'm so glad to have these portraits of them enjoying the snow!

January sunsets

January of 2014 was a month of beautiful sunsets. I captured a number of them, on multiple different days, in various locations around Leesburg. I thought I'd share them all here so you can see the beauty for yourself!

Macro photography: Ice Storm

Last night we were hit by an ice storm, along with most of the rest of the Mid-Atlantic and North East. Leesburg was right on the edge of the ice/rain, and what started as rain last night quickly turned to ice and led to cancelled school and everything glowing white this morning from the coating of ice. After (carefully) walking the dog, I went back outside to grab a few photos before work. I couldn't walk too far from the house for fear of slipping, so I took these shots in front of our house.

 

Sun on Snow

About 3 weeks ago I posted photos of the "winter wonderland" around our house from the first snow of the season. These photos were taken during the snow fall in the morning, but by mid afternoon the clouds had gone away, the sun came out, and I had to take more photos. I've posted a few of these, focusing on my daughter as it was her birthday, but wanted to show my favorites of the rest that I took, as the sun on the snow was just beautiful.

Stratford Christmas Lights

Happy New Year, everyone! To celebrate the start of 2014, I have one last Christmas-related post for this winter. I had hoped to get this posted before the first of the year, but with my trip at the beginning of this week I wasn't able to get to these photos before last night. So, please bear with me through one more Christmas post, and then it's on to other topics! I've got at least 8 posts queued up already, and more coming!

Last Friday night I headed out around our neighborhood to take photos of my neighbor's Christmas lights. I brought a tripod to do some long exposure shots (although these first three were not taken on a tripod), and brought my daughter along to teach her about long exposure using my Powershot on a smaller tripod (you can see her best photos here). While they didn't all come out as hoped, and we got pretty cold by the end, it was a lot of fun to do! Can't wait to see what my neighbors come up with next year.

Winter Wonderland

Two weeks ago today, we had the first real snow of the season. It started Monday night (exactly two weeks ago), and when we woke up Tuesday (which also happened to be my daughter's birthday) the snow was thickly coming down. It was too snowy to risk going outside with my camera, but I grabbed a few shots of the snow on the pond with the geese from the safety of my kitchen (using my 70-300mm lens). So beautiful!

Two family photo shoots

In November I had the pleasure to do two separate family photo shoots - it made for a busy month! I put full sneak peeks of both families on Facebook, but wanted to show my favorite shots from each shoot here. Both shoots were at Morven Park, but ended up so different from each other! That's one of the things that I love most: finding a beautiful location and then personalizing it for each person/family.

Pink Sunset

The first couple of weeks of the month produced some absolutely gorgeous sunsets in our neighborhood. I've been reading about how "cliche" sunset photos are, and how hard it is to take good ones. So, I've been trying not to take too many unless they provide something visually different or interesting. When the sky turned a beautiful shade of pink a couple of weeks ago, I just couldn't resist. So, I grabbed my Powershot and quickly snapped a few to capture that color.

They grow up so fast

Today was my daughter's first day of kindergarten. I of course took photos of her this morning while waiting for the bus, but I also wanted to do a mini photo tonight shoot celebrating her first day.

Back-2-School Promo

I've recently posted on Facebook about the Back-to-School promo that I'm doing: $30 for a 30 minute session for your kids, to capture them as they start their new academic year. Photos taken by the professional company at the school are not only cheesy, and impersonal, but they are prohibitively expensive; while I know the school uses them as a fundraiser, I'd rather donate money in other ways to help! I'd really love to help parents capture these memories of their children in a much more fun, personalized session, so please contact me (abbelynnphotography@gmail.com) to set up a session today!

Mother-daughter maternity shoot

About two months ago, I took some photos of my family's photographer (Blaire at Second Avenue Photography) before she gave birth. Blaire was well into her third trimester when she did our 10th anniversary photo shoot (those photos will be up soon as well, including the description of how they came about and our creative collaboration!), and I really wanted some experience with doing maternity shots. When I asked her if she would be willing to be my model for a maternity shoot, she gladly acquiesced and brought her adorable 2.5 year old along with her for the shoot. We went to the same location as our anniversary shoot, Morven Park, as the scenery is beautiful and we knew we'd have enough room for Izzy to run around. I ended up with dozens of shots that I loved, and quickly posted an album of my faves on Facebook here. I just went through these photos again this week, and realized I hadn't written up a post about them yet, so I thought I would rectify that immediately! Some of these were already posted in the FB album (I loved them enough to post them here again), but some are new.

Sunset over the pond

I discovered today that I purchased a piece of photography equipment and then promptly forgot about it: a polarizing filter that fits my 18-55mm and 70-300mm lenses. I can't believe I put this in my camera bag and then forgot about it! This filter is perfect for bright sunny days, as it eliminates quite a bit of the harsh sun's glare. It made for nice levels of brightness on photos I took today of our kids at the park (I definitely had much less post-editing to do than I would have otherwise on these photos!), and when I was struck by the beauty of our pond at sunset, I took these also using the filter, and again very little editing was needed in post. The colors just POP!

Setting sun: backlighting

Our new house backs onto a beautiful (man-made) pond, which looks especially lovely as the sun is setting at night. 

"Tasha"

I wanted to separate this post from the previous one, even though it took place on the same day and at the same location. While hiking around in Balls Bluff Park with my family, we ran into this beauty below (named Tasha) and her owner Nancy.

Winter at Balls Bluff Park

Yesterday I posted photos on my family blog of us hiking in Balls Bluff Park. In addition to those photos, I took some artistic shots - first of the snow in the woods (this screamed out to be converted to B&W)

Paxton Manor in the Fall

The weekend before Thanksgiving I took the kids out for a walk around our neighborhood, and we headed up to Paxton Manor. I previously took photos of Paxton Manor in the spring...on the whole, I think I like how it looked in the fall much better. The colors in the area were gorgeous, peaking right around that time.

President Obama

On August 2, 2012, President Obama came to Leesburg as part of his campaign speech tour. It was insanely hot, poorly organized, and we were outside for about 4 hours waiting for a 30 minute speech...but despite all of that I'm really glad that I went - the man can give a fantastic speech, and we're happy to help support him in whatever way we can.

Downtown Leesburg

A couple of weeks ago I met my friend Debra in downtown Leesburg to take some photos. She's an amateur photographer like myself, and we've been discussing doing something like this for a while. I was glad we finally had the time to spend a couple of hours walking around. We originally wanted to go into the "country" outside of Leesburg, but that was in the spring - we're now thinking we'll leave that until the fall when the leaves change, as that will make for more beautiful photos. For our first outing, we focused on the beauty of downtown Leesburg. Debra has a photography blog as well; if you want to see her photos, click here

After the rain

Last week a very large thunderstorm came through Leesburg. It didn't last very long, but we were hopeful that it would break the awful heat and humidity we had for the previous few days (for the most part it did). When the storm broke, I could see the sun shining through the clouds into our backyard and didn't want to miss the opportunity to snap a few pictures. 

Flowering bushes

My next door neighbor has two beautiful rhododendrons. They purple flowers are lovely, and the bushes themselves are exceptionally tall - we actually had a landscape architect come by last year to talk to us about our front yard, and she said that they were the largest she'd ever seen! They are almost taking over his front yard. But when they make flowers like this, it's hard to want to cut them back!