Bon Anniversaire

Today was my Great Nana's birthday. It's been 6 months since she left us. I had a rough day and driving home from Illinois I decided to stop and visit and wish her a happy birthday. When I arrived at her grave there were bouquets of flowers and an angel statue resting in front of the stone. I sat for a minute and thought about her life, the impact she had on mine, and what life has been like since she's left. I showed her my tattoo and left her a birthday gift and a letter. The letter read:


















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Anthony- Senior Portraits

I was contacted by my friend Robin a few weeks ago to take pictures of her son Anthony for his senior pictures and I was thrilled that she asked me. Robin and her husband took part in my mini-session Saturday and from then on Robin wanted me to do Anthony's pictures. I got together Saturday afternoon with Anthony, his girlfriend Alex and Robin's mom (Robin was out of town) and we went to the beautiful Bee Tree park for his session. I don't recall the last time I went to Bee Tree, but man is it beautiful! It might be a new favorite spot for pictures. Anthony is a real nice kid who is very talented with the trumpet. We were able to get a few shots with him in his marching band and jazz band uniforms and it was so great to get to see that side of Anthony's personality and life.

It was unseasonably cold that day (I guess this is St. Louis though) and we managed to brave the cold and wind and get some great shots. Here are just a few of my favorites that I took the time to work with today. Thank you Robin for asking me and congrats to Anthony on his big accomplishment of finishing high school.

Thoughts on being unconventional.

I recently posted some of my pictures on a photography forum to somewhat show them off and get some feedback. Overall, I got some good feedback but one comment stood out to me. Someone said that my post processing was all over the place and it didn't seem that I had a particular "look". At first I thought it was true and I spent a couple of hours trying to create a look. It wasn't working. And I know it's not just going to magically appear, it will take some time and I'm just getting started but today I had a revelation. I was inspired by looking through Jesh deRox's beloved collection (look it up, you'll love it)...and what I loved about Jesh's work was that it was full of textures, painted with colors, completely unconventional. The important part is that he caught a beautiful moment with his camera. I loved his stuff because it was him. And with my photography, I want to be me. I'm not about clean cut and I'm not a perfectionist, but I am an artist and I am creative and I'm all about capturing emotion and raw existence. As I'm building my business I'm letting clients know that I most likely won't pose them or try to achieve a particular look, I just want them to feel natural and relax. My editing might be all over the place but it's my art..if a client wants clean cut, crisp editing, of course I'll give that to them. But I hope that over time people can appreciate my style as being something unique, and an experience that they want to be a part of.

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A Successful Snap Happy Saturday!

I'd say Saturday was a great success! I want to thank everyone again for coming out and being a part of this day. I was able to take so many lovely pictures and I'm in the process of editing the majority of them right now. The weather was great, a little windy and chilly, but the lighting was killer. I want to share some of my favorites from the day so far and I'm sure there will be many more.

Spring is Springing with A Snap Happy Saturday

And that makes me a very happy person. That means this little lady can take her camera out and start taking more beautiful pictures outside. I think Xander is getting tired of being my model and my 925 sq foot apartment doesn't offer me much in the way of interesting subject matter.

So now I'm enlisting you, yes you, to be my interesting subject matter. I have all kinds of ideas flowing through my mind and I'd love to be able to execute some of those. But, I need models. So what can you do for me? Volunteer to be in my pictures! It's completely free of charge, I promise it won't hurt, and I'll even edit 20 of the images I take of you and put them on a CD for you to have.

I'm going to take a Saturday and just go Snap Happy all day long. The sessions will be about 30 minutes each and I'll have 6 time slots to sign up for. I will provide props and such and we'll be located at a beautiful location. This could be a great opportunity for those pictures you want to hang up on your wall in your home, or save for greeting cards for holidays. If you are interested please leave a comment or contact me on facebook. I'll update soon on when this event will take place.

Here's some of my work to get an idea of what we can do together!

 

 

 

 

Fix it Friday or Rather Try Again Tuesday

Because I've been slacking behind the camera lately I decided to take some time to work on my editing skills. I really have issues correcting skin tone and tend to default to black and white conversions to fix that. Over at I Heart Faces they do this lovely thing called Fix It Fridays. They upload pictures and then release them to the public to edit them at will. I thought this would be a great way to work on my post processing, especially my issues with skin tone. Some of them are more clean post processing which is what I'm trying to work on right now, and some of them have a little something extra to them.

As a reminder, I did not take any of these pictures. They were submitted by I Heart Faces. I just did the editing.

I'll post the before and afters so you can see what kind of work I did! Leave comments with suggestions if you'd like!
1. Unedited

1) Edited

2) Unedited

2) Edited

3) Unedited

3) Edited

4) Unedited

4) Edited

5) Unedited

 

5) Edited

 

6) Unedited

6) Edited