Fogas Family

I had the pleasure of photographing the Fogas family two weekends ago at the Great Basin in Forest Park.  Again we lucked out with weather and the park provided a great backdrop to great photos.  Gabriella and Christian brought along their pumpkins and bikes to use as props which worked out wonderfully.  They are definitely a brother and sister who love each other and love their parents.

The Bartons

You might remember this cute little boy from a few sessions earlier... Noah and his mom decided they should have some pictures with the whole family, including dad this time.  The Barton's are so fun to take pictures of and they are such a beautiful family- it's hard to take a bad picture.  These were taken at the current hot spot, Tower Grove's "The Ruins".  It was a beautiful fall day.  It was cool and kinda windy, but the trees were beautiful oranges and reds and yellows.  I really enjoyed taking their pictures and had a great time going through them and editing.  They were all so great I wanted to edit them all.  I think I'm starting to get a hang of this photography thing.

I love this.

Olmsted Family

 Courtney emailed me and asked me if I'd like the challenge of photographing a family of 8 (6 kids between the ages of 5-9).  And I accepted.  I was a little nervous because getting everyone to look with their eyes open and smiling all at once seemed like a challenge and 6 kids is a lot.... But the Olmsted family was picture perfect.  They all worked together and were so well-behaved.  It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon, the sun was a little bright, but I think we got a lot of great family shots out of it.

Wicke Family

This past Saturday I had a photo shoot with the Wicke family.  It was my second shoot and my first family shoot.  I was very un-prepared to be truthful.  I discovered I was very bad at giving directions and telling them what to do.  I also realized sunlight can be very tricky.  So unfortunately a lot of my photos turned out over-exposed.  At this session I felt very inadequate.  I also realized shooting more than one kid can be difficult and making everyone look at smile at the same time can be hard.  I was very dis-heartened after this session because I realized I have  a lot to learn.  I can be somewhat of a perfectionist and prideful at times and this was a perfect example of those two flaws.   I think some good pictures came out of it though.  Hopefully this was a good wake up call for me and next time will go better, but this is exactly why I'm not charging.

Noah

I had my first photo session yesterday with Allison and her 14 month old son, Noah.  Allison had replied on The City to my ad and I was totally excited for my first "clients".  Now The Journey is a pretty large church and so it was pretty funny that when Allison got out the car we recognized each other because we are both leaders for the youth group.  (Later I had a realization that I knew Noah from Journey Kids from Wednesday nights last spring)  So we met at Forest Park at one of the ponds and I went at it.  I realized a lot of things during this first session that I need to improve upon (even though this is a hobby I'm very much of a perfectionist and my husband needed to keep reminding me that I'm doing this for fun):

1. When switching locations or settings on my camera, take a shot then look to see if you have everything correct don't keep taking pictures then look because then you have a whole bunch of pictures in a row that are awful because your settings are wrong. (duh!)
2. I need to get better at suggesting new "poses" or locations or you get a ton of pictures in one spot.
3. Somehow when taking pictures of little kids you need to be able to hold your camera still (if you don't have a stand) and get the kid's attention somehow...  
4. I have an artistic background and somehow under pressure (remember this is a fun thing) I forget everything cool that I thought about while planning for this shoot.

I may just being hard on myself, but that's how I work and I think the pictures turned out fairly well for my first time and they're just for free right?  Who can argue or be upset with that?



He is a very cute kid.



New Hobby

So I sort of feel like everyone and anyone is getting into photography lately and I sort of feel like I'm jumping on the band wagon... BUT I've really wanted to do this for like a LONG time, but have never done anything about it until now.  I'm not trying to jump on professional photographers' backs or take over businesses, I'm just doing it for fun, a hobby.  My husband was cool enough to allow me to buy a nice Canon Rebel T3.  I decided to do some free sessions, just to help me learn the camera and try out poses and things like that.  So I go to the The Journey for church and we have an online site that allows you to post ads, so I put up "Free Photographer" and explained that I'm very much of an amateur and just kinda trying this out for fun and what do you know, people jumped over the free-ness.  Putting it up for free took off a lot of pressure, because even if the pictures were horrible no one was out of any money.  So it was pretty cool to get back responses. I'm excited to start this adventure and I'm already looking for a new lense with a greater zoom because my husband and I hike a lot and having a 3x zoom limits what I can take pictures of.  I'm very excited about this hobby and I hope you enjoy watching me grow (hopefully) into somewhat of a great (I'd even go for good) photographer.