Egg Hunt and Portraits for Triplets!

Look at the difference in these beautiful trees at Veteran’s Oasis Park in Chandler, Arizona taken about 20 days apart this spring! Leafy green branches (in the top photos) last week and flowering light pink blossoms just a few weeks ago (in the images below.) I think maybe these are apple trees, because they have little green fruit on them. But I will go back in a few weeks to see for sure. Maybe they are peaches?

The top photos are of my toddler nephew Jonathan hunting for Easter eggs and looking super cute doing it. After the egg hunt, we headed up the little hill to the bubbling oasis the park must be named for - the litlle creek that sends water to the lakes in the park. This park is gorgeous and pretty unique for the Valley of the Sun - I highly recommend visiting it if you feel like you need a dose of nature. Jonathan loves wading in the creek and I know we will be going back there this summer so he can play in the water (much closer and easier than driving to the Salt River.)

The photos below are Kelly and her triplet toddlers amongst the flowering blossoms of these gorgeous trees! Oh how I loved how these photos turned out for Kelly and her little kids! We really lucked out with the light layer of clouds blocking out the sun in the middle of the day and with these trees being in bloom. The light we had was pretty dreamy and rare! When we first got to the blossoming trees, the clouds were not covering the sun and I was wishing badly that I could have been there in the early evening with this little trio and their mom and grandmother. And then the BEST thing happened! Light clouds moved to block the sun and we got the perfect filtered light of my dreams!

The triplets’ grandmother started blowing bubbles for them - scroll down to see how they all wanted to start climbing up the hill to get to her and the bubbles. And then their mom Kelly started blowing bubbles for them. One of my FAVE photos that I have ever taken is the photo of the bubble magnifying the desert globemallow (a.k.a. apricot mallow) flowers. Scroll down and check them out!

This photo shoot of the triplets makes me want to do two things: 1. More photo shoots with babies and bubbles. And 2. Go take more photos of desert flowers magnified by bubbles.

I think I will do both!

Carly at the Valley of the Sunflowers

This is Carly and her daughter at the Valley of the Sunflowers in downtown Phoenix. I organized a picnic at the VOS and told folks that they could stop by and get sunflower photos before the picnic, if they wanted.

This was back in the spring of 2012 and I was taking a break from wedding and portrait photography, but I was still doing personal photography projects and charity event photography.

I had recently downloaded the program Exposure Software. Exposure describes itself as “the image editor designed for the art of photography.” It gives you the ability to make your digital images look like film. At the time, I was really enchanted with the creamy pink way some film looks. I played around with the Portra filter and some other filters to give my images a creamy pink look. I was very influenced by the work of Elizabeth Messina Photography, who uses film and medium format cameras.

So you will see that in the way I edited these images (especially that last image.)

I gave these images to Carly and she gave me a gift certificate to her restaurant, Carly’s Bistro in Roosevelt Row in downtown Phoenix. I took a friend there and ordered tasty food and absinthe for my drink and found out that absinthe makes me feel sick, but it was fun to see what the folks in Paris liked to drink in cafes in the 1860s. I had been to Carly’s a few times before and I knew that I loved the place, so to be able to take a friend and get whatever I wanted to eat and drink was super fun.

I’m doing portrait sessions amongst sunflowers at the Rocker 7 Farm Patch in Buckeye this month. I will be editing them with my bright and vibrant style - not with this film style. If you would like photos of yourself amongst sunflowers, click on this link for more information.

Sparkler photos for the 4th of July

My dear friend Catherine came over to my house in Tempe and we took these photos of her a few days before the 4th of July. I love sparklers and every year I make a point to get photos of friends with sparklers. The whole week before the 4th of July, I had different friends come over and I took pictures each night right before it got dark. It was so much fun and I plan to do it again in 2022, so if we are friends and you would like photos with sparklers, let me know! You’ll not just get sparklers photos when you come to my house, you’ll get ice cream too!

I hung up seamless background paper that I bought from Savage Universal online and then hung up banner fringe that I got from Party City. I wish I had thought to iron out the wrinkles somehow. I will do that next time, though I am not sure how! I used the banner fringe in front of my lens to get the effect that you will see when you scroll through the photos. I love this effect soooo much and see photographers doing it a lot with trees and flowers. I even see photo journalists doing it to make images more interesting. I don’t know if there is a name for it! I need to find out. The first thing that comes to mind is that it is the bokeh effect, but it’s not only that…so is there a particular name for it?

There is such a learning curve to taking photos with sparklers, and I feel like I learn a little more every time I take photos with sparklers. Here are some of my tips:

1. Make sure you have a bucket of water nearby for people to put sparklers in when they no longer want to hold them. If you have a garden hose, keep that nearby and ready to use if any sparks go astray. I’ve never needed to use my garden hose, but it was good to have it close by, just in case.

2. Use a lens with the widest aperture that you can. F2.8 or less is great to use, if you have that kind of lens. I love my Canon L 1.2 mm and I used that for this photo shoot. You could rent a lens, if you need one with a wider aperture.

3. A lot of times when you do a photo shoot, you want the hour or two before sunset for the perfect golden light. For sparkler photos, you will get a few minutes, maybe 10-15 minutes where the light will be perfect for sparklers. Goldilocks light - when it’s not too light and not too dark. Start paying attention in the week before you shoot to find out when those minutes will be. For me, in July, in Arizona, that time arrived at about 7:20/7:30 PM and was gone about 10-20 minutes later.

4. If you need more than ~20 minutes of perfect light, consider using continuous lighting. I didn’t for this shoot, but in the future I might rent lighting from LensProToGo. They don’t just rent lenses, they rent pretty much anything a photographer could need, at prices that are easier than other places I have rented from.

5. As with a lot of portrait photography, getting a little higher than your subjects can be helpful, but I feel it’s especially helpful with sparkler photos. I had a step ladder that I stood on to make taking photos a little easier.

6. Lighting sparklers is kind of tedious, so by the third night of shooting photos, I put some candles in mason jars and used them to light the sparklers instead of lighters or matches. That made it a little bit easier.

Allyson + family at the Queen Creek Wash

I keep thinking about how the Summer of 2021 is upon us, and how this summer will be different than last summer. I will sit outside at restaurants, I’ve got that Pfizer vaccine, so I won’t feel afraid of doing photo shoots, I hope to start playing ultimate Frisbee again. I’ve been making a Summer of 2021 Spotify playlist (Perfume Genius’s “On the Floor” and “imma” by bbno$ & Lentra are the first two songs on there, if you were wondering and I always welcome hearing what other people are listening to) and I feel like I want to go out and experience all the things I couldn’t do last summer. One thing I would really like to do is meet up with other photographers and talk shop.

Something that I have always wanted to do in our hot summer months is portraits of people at the Salt River. Last summer, my sister and my nephew and I went exploring for places to take portraits and we found some beautiful spots. So that is one of my plans!

These photos are of Allyson and her husband and their children from September 2020. The first photo shoot I did for Allyson was in 2011 when her daughter was just a toddler baby, so it’s been fun to see her family grow. We all met up at the Queen Creek Wash and when I got there I was a little freaked out to see there was actually water running in the wash. I had never seen that all the times I have been there. It limited the places we could go for photos, but it turned out quite all right! After we got some family photos, the kids and their parents got to cool off in the water. And I did too. Which was fantastic, because it was a very hot-in-the-hundreds Arizona day.

That’s one of the reasons I want to do a photo shoot at the Salt River. We can all get in the water to cool off! And while I’m talking about plans, I will also share that I plan to do swimming pool photo shoots later this summer with my GoPro. You and your kids can get in the pool and swim underwater and I will take photos. These photos will be documentary style images, not the usual portraits I take.

I will be posting dates on Facebook and Instagram for those water photo shoots and you can also sign up for my email newsletter to be the first to find out about photo shoot dates.