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.

Lavender

A little over 2 weeks ago, I went to Seven Oaks Lavender Farm for a photo shoot with two girls (our babysitters!). I'd purchased a Living Social deal to the farm for 4 people, and thought it would be a beautiful location for a photo shoot. I've got another post coming up with my favorite photos of the girls, but wanted to show the photos of the flora and fauna that I shot as well.

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.

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!

Girls in Tutus

A few weeks ago, my friend Blaire at Second Avenue Photography put a call out over Facebook for some girls to be models for her. She does a number of product shoots for people she "meets" on Etsy, and was doing a trade shoot for a tutu designer (she gets sent the items to photograph on girls, and gets to keep the products). A few of us volunteered, and all met up at a local park to take the photos. Blaire was generous enough to allow me to take a few photos during the shoot, but I stayed out of her way as it was her shoot!

Blaire posted her few favorites here on her blog (there is an embedded link there to even more photos on Facebook from this shoot). 

My shots of course focused primarily on my daughter. The tutus were *just* large enough to fit her, and she had a thoroughly wonderful time modeling various combinations.

Super Moon 2013

In case you hadn't heard, last night (June 23) was the "Super Moon" - the moon was the closest to the Earth that it will be for all of 2013, and according to one report I read it was actually the closest it had been to Earth since 2011. I was worried I wouldn't have a chance to take any photos, but after returning home last night from a friend's house I saw how beautiful it looked and ran outside around 11pm with my camera and tripod to see what I could get.

First try at Macro photography

I think macro photography is fascinating - for any who don't know what it is, just do a quick google image search and you'll see some amazing close-up shots, such as this one of a cat's eye. How amazing is that?! To accomplish this type of shot, there are all kinds of specialty lenses you can buy (there's one I have my eye on that's about $400, which I can't quite swing right now, much less the much higher price ones that are out there!), or you can get ring extension kits to add to an existing lens to allow focus that close up. There is a "trick" to macro photography that you can do without any of these and I've been dying to try it; I finally had time this weekend to give it a shot with some hydrangea flowers I recently received.

Lilies

I was playing around in my kitchen to find a photo to submit for last week's topic of "Green", and these were some of the ones I rejected from that submission. However, I did like these (I was playing around with different DOF and lighting, and thought I'd share these here, partially because I'm too tired tonight to write a more detailed post on something else. 

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 

Changes are happening!

So, lots going on here at AbbeLynn Photography! I've had a busy couple of months, in both life and photography. The life stuff has mostly been detailed on my family blog and FB (Paris, moving, Foxfield, 10th anniversary, work travel, time with kids, time with family, time with friends...the list goes on, as it does for everyone!), but I realized this week that I'd had so much going on photography-wise that I wanted to get it all down in one place! I like to use my family blog as a way of getting down "on paper" a timeline of events that I can go back and refer to later, and I can see the utility in using this blog the same, to chronicle events as my business continues to grow! So periodically (when a lot has happened), I plan to try and get a summary out here - thanks for reading :) Let's see...where to start??