I was more that a little nervous when an agent from New York called me about model photography. I am not a fashion photographer but I love to take pictures. It took us a few months to work out the details with this model. She is in school in Mobile and couldn’t get away to Birmingham but we were able to work out a session while we were at the beach last week. We met in Fairhope for the session and finished up on the bay. I was very excited about the location. I so love downtown Fairhope. It is the perfect little town and I want to live here! We walked all over Fairhope looking for nooks and crannies for the perfect place. I am so excited about the results! They are very much my style… I really love the sun flare pictures!!

I took my sweet friend and model whenever I need her, Anna, to try out new senior locations. We spent the afternoon in the van driving around downtown Birmingham looking for neat little spots. The kids fell asleep in the van and Cory was driving. We would spot a place and tell him to pull over. Anna and I would load out of the van snap a few shots and run back into the van for the next cool location. We certainly had a great time! What do you think of our new locations?

Sigh, she is way to grown up in these pictures… She starts high school this year….double sigh…

The senior season is in full force here and we are super excited. This beautiful girl is one of our senior reps for 2010 seniors. What is that exactly? Email me if you want to know more.

We had a great time hanging out downtown and my favorite spot of the week. This senior is gorgeous but she is also so down to earth! I love to meet girl’s like this. She is the head cheerleader at her school and next year plans to go to the University of Alabama. She is thinking pre-med, so you know she has the brains too!

Get ready for picture overload… always more on Facebook.

 And the biggest compliment ever is what her mom sent me after viewing the gallery. “WOW!!! I knew they would be good… but…. This is amazing. We plan to go thru them together tonight, trying to pick favorites!
Thank you Samantha, this is the most precious sight for the mom of a senior! Seeing her thru your amazing eyes !!!”

That is what I love to hear!

Cory here…  OK, so you know things have gotten backed up when I start writing blog posts.  Simply put, I don’t blog.  Don’t get me wrong, I have a blog… and a Facebook page, and a MySpace page, and have even built a couple dozen websites over the years, but I just don’t have the discipline to keep up with any of them   But, Samantha needs a little relief, so today I blog!

A couple of weekends ago Samantha and I took a road trip with the kiddos up to Nashville, Tennessee for a flash photography workshop held by Neil Van Niekerk.  Samantha and I can use flash just fine, but we wanted to take it to the next level and that’s where Neil can help.  He’s absolutely the on-camera flash KING in the wedding photography world if not, in my opinion, the entire photography industry.  Of course he’s also great at off-camera lighting, but that wasn’t the focus of the workshop.

Here are a few images from the workshop.  Of course, these aren’t exactly our style since it’s not a regular thing to go out and hire models to shoot with, but I think you’ll enjoy them anyway…

This is Neil giving some direction to one of the models…

And here are some of the results.  Notice the natural light on her left.  The right side is compensated by flash from my camera to even things out and bring up the contrast…

And this one is natural light from the back with flash in the front.  Notice the angle of the flash looks like it’s coming from the upper left, but it’s actually coming from my camera.

And here we start working with a bonus portion of the workshop which no one expected: video lighting!  This is a technique starting to really get some traction with photographers and our workshop was blessed with the extra treat of having world famous commercial and wedding photographer Chuck Arlund give a demomstration on how he uses it for his shoots.  The following pictures use nothing but a single, hand-held video light.  It’s fairly dark in these rooms and flash is not used in any way…

And then we moved outside to see what we could do with some off-camera lighting.  This was using two wireless flashes in the back of two softboxes.  The guy in black is Neil holding one of the softbox flashes and the guy behind him is Chuck Arlund helping out.  (That’s not me shooting.  I’m starting to get some white hairs from my kiddos, but am not losing any yet, praise God! )

And here are a few results…

This is one shot from when we were learning how to use a light meter.  Too cool…

And last we went back in for a couple more shots to practice what we had learned.  This is just one of them.  The background was very bright natural light through the window.  Without using flash I would’ve only had two options: 1. expose for the subject so you can see them which would result in the background “blowing out” or being too bright to make out any details, or 2. expose for the background and let the subject be a dark shadowed sillouette.  In this case I exposed for the background, but then lit my subject with just the right amount of flash so both the back and foreground were properly exposed.  Much better

That’s it!  I hope you enjoyed them!

I started compiling a year in review for a slideshow to share with everyone a month ago. A month later and I still haven’t added all the families and brides from the year! What an amazing year it has been! I look at all these families and I can’t help but tear up thinking of all the wonderful people I have met this year. If I missed you in the slideshow please forgive me! If I keep working on this slideshow, I will never get it up on the blog.

Every single picture on here means something to me and that is why I want to share it with you. I am once again humbled that this is our job and we are a part of all of the lives here even if for a short time. Thank you for allowing us to live our dream…..I can’t even imagine what exciting things 2009 will bring. I trust that God has big plans and I just let Him drive. And now….. sit back and press play!

PS. We also updated all of our galleries on both the portrait and wedding website. There are so many pictures on the site that I never blogged! Stay tuned for some exciting news to be released this week!!