Photo shoot at a lavender farm

My previous post were photos of the beautiful flora (and a few fauna!) at the Seven Oaks Lavender Farm. The real reason I went there, however, was to photograph two beautiful young ladies. I've wanted practice with more girls around their teen years, as I'd really like to do senior portraits next year, and our wonderful daycare provider was generous enough to let me use two of her daughters. The girls even volunteered to babysit the night before in exchange for dinner, then spent the night, and we headed out to the lavender farm early Saturday morning (after the appropriate hair and makeup time, of course!).

I wanted to catch the nice morning light; however, even at 9am the sun was quite strong. This was also good practice for me to work with that kind of light, and practice with my reflector to eliminate unwanted shadows. There's still a lot of practice to be done, but I'm very happy with these shots. The first ones are all from within the lavender bushes.

My daughter, the model

It's really wonderful that I have a daughter who loves having her picture taken, and isn't too bothered by posing for me now and again. I try not to only use her as a model (and I do have to remember that she's only 5, and her patience for me to try new things is limited), but every now and again she gives me priceless photos like these. She had her haircut last night, and I wanted to enjoy the beautiful light at sunset in July, so it was a perfect match.

My tiny dancer

Recently, my daughter had her first "big girl" ballet recital, which of course provided many opportunities to photograph her in her full dancing glory. I was able to take photographs of her on both her dress rehearsal and recital day; I wrote a big post about the dress rehearsal on my family blog. I had originally intended to do a separate post here of just portraits of my daughter, but ended up including the ones I would have posted here on the family blog. So, instead I'm doing a first and directing you to that blog for photos of her from the dress rehearsal.

http://aemacbeth.blogspot.com/2013/06/ballet-dress-rehearsal.html 

This is why I love my "nifty fifty"

If you enjoy photography, and have not yet purchased a "nifty fifty" lens (50mm fixed focal length), please run out and do so. I obtained my 50mm f/1.8 lens off of amazon.com for about $100, and it was probably the best $100 that I've spent so far on my photography hobby. There are MANY other lenses that I'd like to  purchase, some of them ranging well up over $1,000, but I believe this one will continue to serve me well. The quality of light, depth of field, ability to focus on a very specific part of the photo...all of these contribute to beautiful photography. If you doubt, look at these amazing shots of my beautiful daughter (and these were taken on an afternoon when she had the stomach flu!).

Morning portraits: children

As I mentioned on my Facebook page when I shared this photo earlier this week, I have a lot of photos to share of the kids all dressed up for Foxfield. I had a lot of photos to share from our weekend in Charlottesville about 3 weeks ago, and decided to split up the posts - I posted an album on Facebook devoted to mostly our friends (the adults), a post on my family blog devoted mostly to my kids, and thought I'd highlight the more "portrait" shots of the kids here. The kids all looked so lovely, and they were so obliging of my photography efforts!

Three kids are better than one

Last month I did quite a few kid shoots; I previously posted photos of Ruth and Bailey, as well as my daughter dressed as a bride. Ruth is very good friends with both of my kids, so at the end of her shoot we took some photos of all of the kids together - here are my favorites!

My daughter, the bride

When I received my in-home studio set up (pictured here in my basement), I was of course very excited to try it out! This involved not just putting everything together, but starting to figure out light placement, and really work with lighting. Fortunately, my daughter is always happy to be my model...mostly because it gives her an excuse to dress up for a little while! Since I wanted to photograph her on the black background, we chose her white bride costume and, well...here are the results!

Kid photo shoots

Recently I did two photo shoots for some friends of my daughter - one is her friend from daycare, and the other is a friend from preschool. I have my favorites in albums on Facebook:
Ruth Ellen's photos
Bailey's photos

The K family

Two weeks ago was my second large family photo shoot. The first you can easily access on the right sidebar - the Nicholson/Philips Family. Two adults, 6 kids...big group! This one was very similar - two parents, five kids, and one grandmother. The shoot primarily focused on the children, and I've shared my favorites of the family in an album on Facebook. It was ridiculously cold and windy, but the location was lovely and everyone was a very good sport despite the weather! We had beautiful early morning light, yet many of my favorites were the ones that I edited to be in black and white and/or muted tones, so I'm highlighting those here. Enjoy!

New Year's Eve Wedding

As I posted here previously, and have mentioned on Facebook, on New Year's Eve I did my first wedding shoot! It was for a very good friend of ours; she is practically family, and I was more than happy to be their official photographer. The wedding was very small, but very beautiful, and having it on NYE was such a unique idea. I have far too many photos to post all of my favorites here, but I have narrowed it down to my "top 10" and put those here for you all to see. They aren't all perfect, and it was definitely a learning experience, but when the bride and groom are happy with the results, so am I. Enjoy!

Portrait idea a la Pinterest

For anyone who has spent any time on Pinterest, you know how easy it is to get sucked down into the ridiculous amount of amazing ideas that abound there, whether it be ideas for craft projects, home decorating, art, photography, recipes...there's just so much. Often when I go there, it's to look for something in specific and then I quickly close the window, as I just don't have the hours and hours to spend there! This post is my take on an idea I saw floating around on both Pinterest and other websites over the holiday season (this photo is just one of many examples that exist of creating the "bokeh" effect, as it's called, with Christmas lights). I thought that with a relatively simple set up (a solid backdrop and some white Christmas lights), I should be able to replicate this idea fairly easily.

Baby B.

At the beginning of January I visited some friends of mine who had recently had a baby (she was 6 weeks old when I photographed her). She was so good - didn't fuss at all when I undressed her for the shoot, and she was so fascinated by the light from the camera that she made a wonderful subject. Here are my faves from the shoot:

Self-portraits: All dressed up

As most of you know, last weekend I attended the Virginia Democrats Inaugural Ball in Arlington, VA. I have not been this dressed up in a long time (hair done by a good friend, spent a lot longer on my makeup than I typically do), so I didn't want to waste the opportunity to take some self portraits. If you're friends with me on Facebook, then you've already seen this first photo below - after taking this off of my camera, it had to become my new profile pic! I don't think I could ask for a better one.

Nutcracker ballerinas

In early December my daughter was an angel in the South Riding Dance Academy's rendition of The Nutcracker. I've posted photos of her already on my family blog, but here I wanted to highlight some of my favorites that I took of the older girls during their performance.

Nicholson-Phillips family: Portraits

I have a few more favorites from my photo shoot from earlier this month to share here.

The Nicholson-Phillips family

Earlier this week I did my first-ever commissioned photo shoot for a friend of mine! I was so excited to finally do this - and to start with a family of 8 was quite the experience! We shot at the entrance to Red Rocks Wilderness Overlook in Leesburg, and despite missing the best setting sunlight, I captured some beautiful shots of their family.

Portraits of children

I took a large amount of photos at my friend's daughter's baptism. Many were of course of my friend's family and the baptism itself, but I also snagged a few photos of the other kids that were present.

Family portraits at the beach

On our very last night in the Outer Banks last month, I wanted to head down to the beach after dinner and take some photos at sunset. However, upon our arrival at the beach access we were told by people leaving the beach that the flies were really bad, so we chose not to venture all the way down. Instead, we stopped at the gazebo at the top of the dune and took some photos from there.

UVA shirt photo shoot

My friends and I had the idea while at the beach last month to dress all of our children in the same Virginia shirts and take some photos. Because one friend already had two orange shirts for the boys, we decided to do boys in orange and girls in white. All 7 children were quite cooperative, and let us get these great shots.

Our little dancer

About five weeks ago my daughter had her second dance recital. Her teacher had organized professional photo shoots for all of the dancers, but unfortunately I was unable to make it to either of the designated dates so we couldn't take part. I figured - why not try to take some shots of her in her costume myself? And as I love using natural light, I thought that doing it outdoors would be a lot of fun.