Seniors 2012 - Abbie

This weekend, I photographed Abbie, who is from the opposite side of the city.  She wanted me to do her pictures, though, as I had done her cousin Janelle's two years ago.  We met partway, at Janelle's mom's house and I set up my background in the living room.  Ended up using the prime lens (still on that manual kick!) and window light, and the pictures turned out beautiful!!

We went around the house and yard for a bit, taking pictures and trying to convince Abbie's little cousin, who is about two, that it wasn't her turn.  I had been photographing her on the background while Abbie was changing and the little one was all about it.

In my years as a photographer, and having a strong tendency to convert to black and white (probably due to my days in the darkroom), I've realized some people look better in color and some look better in black and white.  There's also sepia and faded color.  Vibrant color.  A big part of this is a personality thing, but there's also style/wardrobe (which plays into personality but can change) and even just physical appearance (face/body type/etc) or location.  Abbie is a sepia.  Sepia makes me think of pretty vintage things, classic portraits, World War II and the 1940s, and she definitely has a vintage kind of style.

We went to the old railway station in Coraopolis to shoot.  I've always wanted to photograph there - my bus drove by it every day for the two and a half years I rode it - but never have.  When we were emailing, setting up our shoot, Abbie suggested the station and I jumped on the chance.

How classic is that?!

Liv and the Downpour

When I first started having an interest in photography, I was about 17 and recruited my sister and her friends (who are 4 or 5 years younger) to be my models.  It's always fun shooting with them again because they've grown from silly middle schoolers to beautiful college girls.  Today I photographed Liv, one of these girls and my "happy model."  She's always smiling!

She came by apartment and we picked an outfit, figured out her makeup and headed to the local ice cream shop/mini golf course, The Windmill, to shoot in their overgrown driving range.  I'm still on my 50mm f2 prime kick, so had that on my Pentax K20D.  It was bright but overcast, so the natural light was beautiful - no flash photography, please!

We didn't really have a set plan, mostly just "pretty pictures in a field."  But the weather decided to give us a more exciting shoot than we had anticipated when it started raining.  It had POURED earlier in the day but cleared up.  This wasn't as terrible, so we continued shooting and laughed about the rain and thunder and how the sky certainly didn't look all that bad!

Thankfully the storm didn't last very long and there was even a rainbow after!

Luckily we got in the car before the rain started up again, because on the way home it absolutely poured!!  Gotta love Pittsburgh weather.

John Family Portraits

My cousin Paul and his wife Jen were in town from South Carolina and asked me to do family portraits of them, their two kids and dog.  Of course I said yes!  We went to Moon Park on Monday around 7pm so it wasn't terribly hot and miserable.  We did very sweet family portraits at a picnic table and a in clearing.

After the cute family stuff, I took some more playful shots of the kids.

Brian is 6 and Mikayla is 8 and I absolutely love them.  On Sunday, Mik and I had a paper airplane fight that ended up with her getting chalk all over me.  *sigh*  Adorable, right?  Most of my pictures were of the kids, because, well, they're kids and they're cute, but I got some nice ones of Jen and Paul too.

For the entire shoot I used my manual focus 50mm prime f2 lens.  I blame Chris Gooden, another photographer, who is friends with Trix.  They came to The Fallout Shelter last weekend and he let me try out his Canon 5D Mark II with an 85mm prime f1.2 lens.  I nearly died of happiness and really didn't want to give it back.  SO NICE.  Someday,  I will have equipment that fancy.  Someday.

Seniors 2012 - Allie

Let's go back about...14 years.  I was almost 10 years old, starting 5th grade at a new school.  I made one friend, her name was Whitney.  She remained my closest friend for years after that.  We had fights, like everyone does, but we were friends for 11 years, until the day she died in a car wreck, engaged to my cousin's cousin.

Whitney had a niece, Alison, who went to pre-school with my brother when we started at that new school.  I haven't seen her since the funeral nearly 3 years ago, but she asked me to do her senior portraits.  I was honored to, because when I was younger, this was my second family and I missed them.

Because my air conditioning is broken and it's been REALLY hot lately, I took my backdrop setup to Allie's house for yearbook portraits.

After that we went to Ambridge High School and took some photos of Allie in her letterman jacket and band jacket.  She plays the piccolo, which I'm not really sure I spelled right....  It was pretty cool, I had my 75-300mm lens on and stood in the stands while she was out in the middle of the football field.  Definitely different.

We hit up one more place after that, a park a few minutes from the high school.  There was a gazebo there and I broke out my manual focus, 50mm, f2 lens.  GORGEOUS!!!

So yeah.  Super psyched to see Allie and her mom again, super psyched about how pretty her pictures turned out, it was all around a really good shoot!