Sunday, June 22, 2008

Practicing

Most of you know I've been getting pretty interested in photography lately. Sunday, the 15th of June, my 53rd birthday, and Friday, the 20th of June, I decided to get some practice taking "Senior Pictures" since I've had several requests to do them. On Sunday I took Mary and she had so much fun that on Friday she got Sarah Rudy and Emily and we went again. It's so helpful to me to work with real people and try to get them to pose. Only a couple weeks earlier, Carol Arndt was visiting when I said it was time to go find some pictures. Jeanne suggested I take Carol along so Carol, Jeanne and I piled into the car to find some pictures. Carol asked where we were going and I said, "you choose." So she told me to head to Bainbridge. She took me to the "Haldeman Mansion" which I had never heard of in the 14 years we'd lived here. It turned out to be a fantastic place to take pictures, so I took Mary and then all three girls back to practice senior pictures. mary was particularly fun on Sunday because she was willing to jump out onto rocks in the stream, which turned out to be a fantastic place for pictures (see above).
Sarah was one of the kids down the street. She is two years older than Mary, but all the kids played together and she and Mary have remained fast friends. She's away at college so we don't see her much, but when she came over I couldn't help but remark to Jeanne how she just keeps getting more and more beautiful. You can see from the above photo that she is a truly beautiful young woman.
One of the things I'd like to do is take "different" portraits than the standard senior pictures. I don't know if anyone will like them but the above picture of Mary shows an attempt to move standard senior pictures into more of the realm of art. It was almost 8p by the time we got to this picture so the light was very pink and seemed impossible to correct with my white balance. so, I converted to black and white and was so glad the color didn't work because this picture just needed to be in black and white.
There is at the mansion an old carriage house with a marvelous red brick wall. Again, above I tried to get a little artsy with a portrait of two friends, Sarah and Emily. I love the contrasting textures of the brick and stone and cropped the photo to capture the old window in the upper left corner, which gives the picture a bit more character and another texture entirely.
Sarah loves to smile but she's a pretty good little model as well. I told her to just lean against the wall and give me a blank look. She did a pretty darn good job.
Mary, on the other hand, just can't not smile. Her exuding happiness apparently preempts any attempt to form any other "look." She still made a pretty dramatic subject in her red sweater against the brick and stone and contrasted by the green grass.

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