Newborn Portraits

Recently I watched a video about a photographer named John Ridgeway who specializes in newborn portraiture. He has an amazing gift for working with babies! After watching him work, I really wanted to try some newborn photography (I really have not done much). As luck would have it, one of my existing clients just had a baby, so borrowed him as a test subject. He was very cooperative and stayed sound asleep for most of the shoot. The was a great learning experience for me and I think the images came out pretty nice.

Madden is 12 days old in these pictures. I washed some of the color out of this shot in Photoshop to give it a kind of sleeping-on-a-cloud look.

Look as his cute little fingers!

I thought jeans would be a fun alternative to the traditional stack-of-towels baby portrait.

He woke up long enough to give a collossal yawn, and then he was out again!

A great big Thank You to the Fields family for letting me do this!

Lisa and Eric’s Wedding

Normally, I get a few images up within a few days of an event, but here it is Thursday, and I am just now getting something on the blog about Saturday’s wedding! Lisa and Eric were married at Cooper Chapel in Bella Vista on September 5th. I had not shot at Cooper Chapel in quite a while, and it is always nice to shoot in a place you are familiar with (and that looks so nice in pictures). There were lots of kids in the wedding and in the audience, which is always fine with me since I  like taking kid pictures. Here are a few pics while I work on sorting through the rest:

We got a chance for a few quick bridal portraits before the ceremony by using the little porch beside the office/changing room. I like the lighting in the image with the bright areas of the background bringing the focus to Lisa's face.

A cute candid shot with one of the many kids in attendance.

The ring ceremony. At Cooper Chapel, I like to find a spot in the front row to shoot sitting down, that way I am not blocking everyone's view, and the picture will have more of the upper curved window showing.

Resessional shots are some of my favorites, because you get very genuine smiles from the bride and groom.

Another fun candid shot. I like this image both as a color study, and because everyone in the image is doing something different. The "camera face" from the only kid that spotted me is cute, too.

Keisha and Justin’s Wedding

Keisha and Justin were married at Chapel on the Creeks in Rogers, AR on September 4th. The forecast did not look good, but the rain held off and we actually got to do some outdoor portraits after the ceremony. The grounds around the chapel are really nice so I was glad we could use them!

As a photographer, you can’t help when something catches your interest and you end up taking way too many pictures of one thing. In this case I am referring to the two year old flower girl who is probably one of the cutest flower girls I have seen. She was very good, especially considering her age. She was hard to catch smiling, I think there was too much going on, but that did not make her any less adorable! Here are a few images from the wedding while I work on sorting through the rest:

Super Cute flower girl

This was a funny picture that the bridesmaids came up with, they couldn't quite coordinate the jump, but it's a fun shot anyway.

Chapel on the Creeks is very popular with brides, as you can imagine with a foyer like this!

The nice thing about the cloudy weather is that it gave really nice filtered light through the big front windows during the ceremony.

Ok, one more flower girl pic - this one is from the reception where she was hiding under the brides table.

Album designs

One of the things I enjoy most about wedding photography is designing albums. It is fun to take the images and present them as a story of the wedding day. Since I do all the design work myself, I am not restricted to certain styles, and I can make as many changes as the client wishes after the initial design.  Usually, I have an idea for a particular page in the album, so I start there and use that to determine the style that particular album will have. Here are a few pages from some of my summer wedding albums:

This page shows images from the traditional first dance and parents dance. I like the kind of dreamy look to the black and whites (added with a filter) and how the outline of the couple in the center image almost makes a heart shape. Add in the bouquet in the background, and you have a very romanitc look.

Sometimes trying to include all the important portraits in an album can be challenging, especially if the album doesn't have many pages! I like this look with one big image being the background for the smaller images. It helps give the page some style even though there are lots of images.

My larger albums usually have what I call a "setting" page, which will have lots of little images to show off the style and location of the wedding. I got the idea for this one from fashion magazine covers where the model's head covers part of the title.