Portraits - Jen

Last week my graphic designer friend Jen came over to hang out and take some pictures.  We actually went to high school together, and were cool, but not really friends.  Now that we're both in the arts, we talk online sometimes and share cool things we've found.  She does really amazing work (I want her to redesign my website!) so check out her stuff at www.jendorman.com.  I suggest you look under the "Projects" section, in which there is a very cool Evil Dead 2 patch.  After you do that, be jealous, because she gave me one and it is AWESOME.

So anyway.  Jen has pretty cool style, and is especially interesting in that she wears a lot of skirts and dresses.  Do girls really do that anymore?  I don't know, I wear jeans.

First off, she wanted to be in my body mod project with her back tattoo(s).  There's a photo in the album on Facebook of the bigger one, but she also showed off her semi-colon tat, explaining that she designed it herself and that the semi-colon is a favorite punctuation mark.  That's slightly random, but ok.  Semi-colons are pretty cool, yeah.  Also, I'm really aware of my punctuation now and feel the second sentence in this paragraph may require a semi-colon somewhere.....

Yay!  I love this picture.  Backlit by softbox.

Classy.

 

And classier.  In the glass, by the way, is grape gin, which is surprisingly good as I generally find gin rather foul.  Jen also is a fan.  Cheers!

Jeff and Christine

My uncle Jeff and his wife Christine wanted to get photos taken, so they asked me, their amazing photographer niece, to do so for them.  We were supposed to do this last time they were in town like a year ago, but it didn't work out, so when they came up for his birthday last weekend, we finally got around to it.

Seeing as they don't live around here, there wasn't anywhere special they really wanted to go.  We ended up taking some shots on the roof of the bowling alley in their NASA shirts (they both work for NASA, cool, right?)

After that, we went to the park.  Not gonna lie, it's slightly creepy to see my uncle be cutesy, but these were couples pictures, so it had to happen.  I got over it.  Some of the shoot was pretty ridiculous, but then again, this is my family, so it's bound to be a little weird.

This last shot, by the way, is Christine and Uncle Jeff pretending to be fashion models who are not caring or being pleased about getting their picture taken for the cover of some huge magazine.  I told you we're ridiculous.

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.

Baby Portraits of Cody

If I want to have a successful portrait studio (which I do) then I have to learn to do mainstream stuff.  As much as I love my bands, and as amazing at it would be to spend my life photographing them (and getting paid for it, how awesome would THAT be?!), I gotta be able to pay the bills.  I've done the senior portrait thing, and, amazingly enough, it's fun.  The seniors I photograph are cool, and their parents obviously are too, because a lot of my work is nontraditional and they have faith in me, with my strangely colored hair and portfolio featuring zombies and musicians, to capture beautiful images of their children.  These are nearly grown-up children though, high school seniors.  They have opinions of their own and can say "hey Mom (or Dad), this chick does cool stuff, let's go to her" and Mom might listen.  Small children, infants, they're a little different.  The parents pick the photographer, and I know some parents go for traditional.

I'm not traditional, but I like kids, and would have no qualms about getting into photographing them.  Kids are hysterical.  My friend Rosa, who I've known since 8th grade (nearly 10 years now!!  Wow, I JUST realized that and feel old), has a son, Cody, who will be 7 months old in a couple days time and is freakin' adorable.  Today we hung out and I took pictures of him to practice.  Some of these are edited, some aren't.  If it has a crappy background, it obviously isn't.  I really need to splurge on a nice one instead of that paper thing I've been using for the last 2 or 3 years.

 

This kid makes the best faces, he's awesome.  I had my softbox going, which is like 5 times the size of Cody, so he was kind of in awe of it.  The backdrop was set up in kitchen as usual, but the floor is hard, so we had my down comforter under it in case he fell over.  Which he did, so having the cushioning was good foresight.  Rosa brought some of his toys, like his lion puppet, so we played with those for a bit, then I went to see what I had.  Sadly, I could not find my giant purple bunny, but it's purple and would have looked weird with his green outfit anyway.  I did find a leopard-print octopus though, which Cody LOVED.  The shot below with his feet up (sooo cute!) is when Rosa was dangling it above him, as you can see in another shot.  Then we sat him back up, took a few more pictures, and went to the Chinese buffet for lunch.

 

What I've been working on lately

It's been awhile since I last updated. I graduated in June and have been doing some freelance work including something a little different from my usual style lately: SENIOR PICTURES! Dun dun DUN! The one to the left here is my lovely cousin Meghan. Some moms are a little worried that I'm too edgy to do senior portrait, but I do a decent job. Yes, some of my images may be interesting looking than your average portrait studio senior portraits, but who's to say that's a bad thing?! Not all kids want the cookie-cutter photos that so many of the major studios in the area offer.


I've also been doing some promos for local bands such as Sunday Morning (a No Doubt tribute band) and Ohio metal band Resistance 13. Photographing bands is very, very different than photographing high schoolers, but the variety keeps my perspective fresh. Sunday Morning especially was a challenge because we were attempting to keep with the No Doubt aesthetic. Mimicking their style was definitely fun and the singer, Courtney, is a graphic designer so I provided her with images that she then made into a flier, seen below.