Calla illuminated

My dog is particularly difficult to take photos of, due to her black coat. Unless the illumination is JUST right, she ends up looking like an undefined black mass of fur with big brown eyes peeking out. And if I use a flash, then her eyes are just a red reflection back at me. A few weeks ago I was home during the day and she was lying quietly in the sun, and I suddenly had the perfect submission for my Weekly Photo Project submission that week: "Illuminated".

I submitted this photo on the left.
Sadly, it didn't win but I still felt like it was a pretty good submission.

I ended up with about 15 favorites from shooting her - here are a couple of those; to prevent this post from being ridiculously long you can see the rest on AbbeLynn Photography on Facebook (while you're there, please "like" my page!).

Richmond capital building

Last month my husband and I spent some time in the Capital building in Richmond, VA. The building is beautiful, and while I was waiting for our event to begin I took a few shots of the decorations inside of the state legislature room.

Reindeer in Richmond

A week before Christmas, my husband and I spent the night in Richmond so that he could cast his Electoral College vote. While having dinner downtown, we stumbled upon a town light display and I wanted to grab a few pics. Lit deer everywhere!

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.

Disney on Ice

Back in October, I took my daughter to Disney on Ice at the Patriot Center. I have to admit, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would! They did four stories: The Little Mermaid (Ariel), Tangled (Rapunzel), Beauty & the Beast (Belle), and Brave (Merida). Natalie absolutely loved it, and I had a lot of fun using my telephoto lens to capture the ice dancers. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of photos I was able to get given that I was using a telelphoto for many of them, and the skaters were moving. I thought I'd finally get around to sharing them here!

Tiny Toes Dance Shop

A couple of weeks ago I was at my daughter's dance class and realized that I'd forgotten my book, my iPad, and my phone was about to die...which left me with only my camera to entertain myself. As parents aren't allowed in for most of class, I couldn't take photos of her, so I occupied myself instead with things I found in the dance gift shop.

Geese

These photos were taken of geese at a lake in Crump Park, Richmond, VA on the day after Thanksgiving. All were shot using my 75-300mm telephoto lens; however, we were still pretty close to these geese!

Rizzo

My parents' dog Rizzo is extremely photogenic; her coloring just makes her so easy to photograph. She was sitting quietly over Thanksgiving and let me grab these couple of photos of her with my 50mm lens. Of the 10 or so that I took, these three were my favorite.

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.

Light trails

My kids have colored flashlights that they enjoy playing with while the lights are out. I wanted to play with long exposure times, and thought that having the kids move these lights around in the darkened living room could make for some cool shots.