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!

Weekly Photo Project: Another Win!

I've been remiss in keeping the blog updated with my submissions to the Weekly Photo Project, but something happened this week to make me remember - I won! For the week of August 4-11, my submission was chosen as the week's favorite. 

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.

Baby B is 7 months old!

A whole week into August and I have yet to write a blog post here! For shame, AbbeLynn. Things have been a bit busy for me personally in the past couple of weeks, and despite not putting anything up here I've been busily editing photos in the background! I finished up with the photos of my friends' 7 month old daughter, and put a teaser album on FB here. Before I get wrapped up in the many other photos I have to edit, organize, and post, I thought I would highlight the more artistic edits here, as I didn't post these on FB. She was such a good baby; if even half of the baby shoots I hope to do in the future go this well, I will be a very happy photog!

 

 

Geese Part 2: Portraits

 About six weeks ago, our resident flock of geese were having a late dinner just outside of our backyard. This seems to be their preferred place to eat at night, and every on this evening the light was great for some portraits. Even better, none of the babies were around, so the adults weren't as shy (ok, mean) and let me get pretty close to them. With the use of my 70-300mm telephoto lens, I got some pretty great close-ups!

Sunset on the Sound

To bracket my sunrise photos I took over the Atlantic Ocean, I took my family to the west side of the Outer Banks, over the Albemarle Sound, to photograph the sunset. 

Dolphin boat tour

Just before we went to the Outer Banks at the beginning of July, I purchased a neutral density filter and dug out the polarizing filter that I bought and promptly forgot about. On one afternoon, we purchased tickets to go on a dolphin boat tour and I knew this would be the perfect place to try out the ND filter to cut the bright summer afternoon light.

Sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean

Every year when we go to the beach, I have grand plans to photograph the sunrise, and every year I never do, as vacation is a time for sleeping in! This year, I swore would be different, and woke up very early one morning, heading over with my dad. It was stunningly beautiful.

4th of July fireworks

We didn't watch any town-run fireworks this year, choosing instead to set off our own small ones and sparklers. 

Ospreys at the Outer Banks

The three most recent posts on my family blog have included photos I took on my new point-and-shoot camera, the Canon Powershot SX500. For such a small camera, it packs a lot of punch! I have been very happy with the photos taken with it in the past week or so...so much so, that I'm going to show off a few of them here! Of course, the quality isn't what I get on my Canon Rebel DSLR, but I had no expectation it would be. I think you'll agree, however, that the results are still pretty great!

As I mentioned in one of these earlier posts, I went for a walk with my mom and aunt by Kill Devil Bay, part of the Albemarle Sound in the Outer Banks. When we walked out onto a pier, there was an osprey nest nearby that had quite a bit of activity. Note: the pier we were standing on was about 30 yards away from the nest.

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??