Seniors 2012 - Ellie

It's always a little weird doing senior pictures for my siblings' friends, because I've known many of them since they were young.  This was one of the odder ones, because Elizabeth is a family friend and I've known her literally her entire life.  When I was asked to do her pictures though, I was definitely excited!

For the formal shots, I went to their house, and almost the entire family was there, with the exception of Nora, who is my age.  Test shots were taken with Ellie's parents, which was very funny.  Landon helped me carry equipment in and Victor was cooking dinner.  I got an offer to stay, but had plans with my boyfriend so could not.

After headshots, we went to a park in Sewickley, which I wasn't too impressed by but we did get some beautiful shots of her lying in the grass and leaves.

After the Triangle Park, we decided to hit a nature reserve across the street from their plan.  It had all these beautiful yellow flowers and we took some absolutely amazing pictures!!  Had to put on my polarizing filter to get the sky to turn out right, so that was fun too.  I'm so happy with how they came out!

September

I've been meaning to update for three weeks now!  It's been a crazy month, and October is sure to be too.  Let's see....on September 3rd, I photographed Rick and Lisa's wedding - it was at Shakespeare's, this beautiful castle restaurant/gold course out near Ellwood city.  It was a small and sweet wedding.

That same weekend my friend Sherry came in from New Jersey to celebrate our 24th birthdays!  Hers is September 4th and mine is the 5th.  On the 4th we went with some of my friends from River Runs Scarlet to go see Evolove in Cleveland.  RRS opened for Evolove when we were in LA last summer, so it was great to see them again!

A week after my birthday, I moved.  Only about a mile away, but this means I currently do not have studio space, so shoots are all being conducted on location (studio shoots in people's living rooms, that sort of thing).  Luckily my entire set-up fits in my car and I just bought a portable power pack for my lights AND, yesterday, another light (thank you, Shannon!).  Neither of the new things have been used yet and I must admit I'm getting a bit antsy.

Let's see.....what else have I done this month?  ADORABLE pictures of a little boy named Nathan!  His mommy is in Afghanistan, so his aunt wanted photos taken of him.  In this one, he's holding his mother's dog tags.

I need to do more photos of children, they're so fun.

Yesterday I had a senior portrait shoot with my friend Elizabeth, but she's going to get her own post tomorrow.  I have a few more senior shoots coming up within the next few weeks, as well as a wedding, headshots and a band shoot!  Busy busy busy.

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!

Seniors 2012 - Becca

Becca is my brother's ex-girlfriend, but she still wanted her pictures done by me which is just proof to how awesome I am.  No, seriously.  Anyway, she's pretty awesome herself, especially since she also likes photography.  And, like mine, her family owns a bowling alley.  Weird, right?


We actually ended up splitting up the outdoors and indoors photo sessions - I usually do both in the same day but due to time constraints it worked out better to do them different days.  The first was the outdoor session, which is what all these pictures are from.  I let Becca pick which to put up and she liked these best.  (Also, pretty much the best thing in the world is being told that someone expected picking photos to be much easier but everything is so beautiful that it's impossible.  Thank you, Shelley!!!)

We went to a park near the river in Sewickley and I got totally lost on the way there and had to call Becca's mom Shelley to figure out just where I was headed.  Once I got there though, all was well.  There was this cool little train thing, and railroad tracks, and a pavilion and all kinds of prettiness.

I kept telling Becca to "gaze off into the distance" and such, and she kept laughing and making funny faces and telling me she's used to being on the other side of the camera.  TOO BAD!  We also had a worrisome moment when her dog, Joey, ran off and she had to go run and catch him.  Joey was getting his picture taken too, which apparently he absolutely hates.  However, I had my 70-300mm lens in the arsenal and was able to step back and get some ridiculously cute pictures of the two of them.

I gotta say, it was the perfect day to photograph.  Nice outside, bright, but overcast enough that the light was soft and beautiful.  No weird shadows, great colors!  I brought out the reflector once or twice to get a little more light on Becca's face, but that was it.  Do plan on buying a Vagabond power source for my Alien Bee's soon though, so I can light outdoors shots as well as studio stuff.  Speaking of studio, I'm putting a shot of Becca in the Tattoo album on my Facebook page, so if you want to check that, it'll be there!  www.facebook.com/elenadeephoto