I have been learning a lot about branding and various marketing strategies.  One of those was a project we created in InDesign for an ePub document that can be used for portfolios.  I really enjoyed this assignment; it totally made me think of scrapbooking and I love that! 

For this project I chose to showcase some of the family photo experiences I have been working on recently.  Let me know if you would like to book your session with me before Christmas, I would love to be able to help you capture some great memories with your loved ones.

Click here to view my interactive Family Portfolio.

Grandma and her sweet little granddaughter

 taking a walk while I made images of her cousin.

Photographic Media Field Trip

I love how we are learning to see light differently; the way it mottles the ground as the sun streams through the leaves, the texture it adds, or takes away, from a  surface, the shadows created as someone walks through your light source.  I love the beauty that light brings to the world around us.  

It was a great afternoon of class where we were able to go downtown to Browne's Addition and wander and just photograph things as we saw them, trying to focus on a few different things/techniques in our environment: lights, mottling, panning, reflections, shallow depth of field, etc.  I love shallow depth of field so I often do have my camera set to a wide open aperture so that I can focus directly on my subject and letting the rest fall off so they can shine.  

I tried a few different things for reflections, but didn't have as much success as I thought I would.  I tried to capture the clearness of the apartment buildings in Jadyn's sunglasses, but it wasn't nearly as clear as what I though it was to my naked eye.  The wine glasses in the restaurant window as we walked past were lovely and you could see some of the building from across the street and a few trees if you look closely enough.  I also stood to the side as Shae tried to photograph Sarah from inside the copy shop window as she was reflected back through the window that was close to me.  While they aren't the clearest of photographs, it was fun to try and capture these images.

As Elizabeth and I walked along we walked under a chestnut tree.  I had never really paid attention to how large the pods for these chestnuts were.  They are huge!  Elizabeth loves these as they remind her of her childhood and picking them and reaching inside after cracking them open so she could see the fruit of the nuts inside.  As she squished it, it started to crack.  She reached down, picked it up and began opening it to reveal the goodies inside.  Excitement arose as she discovered that not there were three inside, not the more common two!  Chestnuts are lovely as they emerge from their pod; all shiny and lovely brown-red in color.  Chestnuts are simply beautiful!

It was a great day - one that I am not only grateful for the opportunity to photograph the beauty around me, but to also be able to do that with friends and classmates who can share this beauty from their point of view and to remember it in the form of a photograph.

Girl cracking up walnut pods to reveal the three chestnuts inside on October 5, 2017 in downtown Spokane, Browne's Addition, Washington.

Girl cracking up walnut pods to reveal the three chestnuts inside on October 5, 2017 in downtown Spokane, Browne's Addition, Washington.

Girl cracking up walnut pods to reveal the three chestnuts inside on October 5, 2017 in downtown Spokane, Browne's Addition, Washington.

Braelynn - Class of 2018

Braelynn is so fun!  We had a great time with her senior session, even if the smoke from the forest fires still lingered in the air.

I have learned a few things from this session that will be good to keep in mind from here on out.  One, don't use the gold reflector that comes in the 5-in-1 kit (why do they even include one?); it make skin tones so much more orange and a chore to remove.  Two, smoky days are NOT for photographing in.  Unlike cloud cover the smoke also contributes to a more orange skin tone.   After trying to remove those colors, these are the images I was able to share with Braelynn and her family.

I really enjoyed this senior shoot at Finch Arboretum.  Teylor was a lot of fun to work with and she's so lovely.  I spent a few hours capturing some of her awesome personality.    These are just a few of my favorite images of her!

 

 

 

Film Noir

Each year my program, Spokane Falls Community College, rents the Riverside Event Center and we students, along with instructors, are able to do some real location photography.  The goal is to give us the opportunity to use our creative vision to create various photo shoots, all ranging from large production to small production shoots.  My friend, Cory, and I arranged for two large production shoots.  We find models for these shoots, use a hair and make-up school to get our models all ready, and even have to put out costumes together.  Thankfully we have the assistance of our local Civic Theater that guides us with our costumes.

The second of these shoots was a film noir type image.  Cory headed up this shoot and I assisted.  We had a lot of fun capturing these, but it was a process for sure!  We recruited three of our fellow classmates to model for us, along with my daughter.  Our vision was a male piano player with three femme fatales vying for his attention.  The photo below is one of the images I captured in-between shots that Cory was taking.  We were getting all set up while we waited for our final lady to finish getting her hair and makeup done.

In addition to working with Cory for the group large production image, I wanted to take advantage of the lights to capture some other images I had in mind with our ladies.  I have a friend who has a 3D printer and asked him to make me an old time microphone (if you want more info on this let me know and I can connect you with him).  

These images are a start, I know I still have much to learn, but I enjoyed working on them!

Video Short - Studio 1 Final Project

Prior to this quarter I had no knowledge of how to create a video.  This was an effort for sure!  I got it figured out pretty well; iMovie was the source I used to create it.  This program is fairly simple to use; I was able to figure it out without any assistance.  I had to use the same program to create the video for my studio design course last week.

One of the challenges I faced was that a lot of the video I recorded was far more than what I needed for this project.  Clipping it down to meet the 2-3 minute requirement took me a very long time to do because there were several things in each one that I wanted to keep to share.  I am excited to have learned this new skill and to see other ways I can use it in the future.  I think it’s fun seeing how the videos can enhance your still photos in a new way by seeing what goes into making these images.  We see photographs and don’t necessarily think about the lighting or the time that was needed to make the images.  I have a better understanding now of the production of these images and by seeing them put together with the video helped that knowledge.

This studio class was challenging for me.  I learned a lot, but I also know that I still have so much more to learn.  Ratios are still a hard concept for me to understand; time will improve that.  I also learned that my notes need to be better throughout the quarter. I am aware that I am a procrastinator, it’s something that I drive myself crazy with, but I need to do better in future quarters.  I am hoping that if the assignment requirements are the same, like the blog style formatting record, and the video short, that I can create the documents as we go through each class so that I am not trying to sort all of the things at one time, creating undue stress on myself.

I enjoyed learning how to photograph people and still life better.  This was something I had wanted to improve on when I began the class.  I am by no means done with learning, I hope to be a lifelong learner, but I’m glad I have a better understanding of lighting and posing/positioning subjects/objects. 

I am looking forward to this next quarter of classes where we will be learning more about color and doing some location photography.