Photographers Photographing Photographers

Recently I got together with an old friend, Stacie (a very talented real-estate photographer), because we both needed new headshots for our websites, and both wanted something fun to break up the winter doldrums.

She had a great location we could use, though to e honest we probably spent more time chatting than working.

It’s always fun getting together with other photographers to exchange ideas, try new things, and just generally mess around without as much pressure to have a perfect end result.

(Clearly we both really liked this window…)

That said, I’m pretty happy with how my portraits of Stacie came out, and really love the photos she got of me! It’s not often I’m in front of a camera, but I find as I get older and a bit less self conscious that it can be a fun place to be.

We’ve already got plans in the works to meet up again if it ever snows for some chilly outdoor portraits. Should be fun!

Throwback: Flexability

(I’m on the road a lot this month, so here’s another throwback post, to an amazing series of shoots that produced one of my favorite - and only - diptychs of my career.)

Early on, I was looking for some fun and different ways to use my studio set-up, and my friend Amanda suggested doing some photos of her yoga practice.

She ran through a variety of positions as I used a couple of different lighting setups.

It was a ton of fun. And an extra cool detail - when I did her maternity photos the following year, we made sure she hit a few of the same poses so we could get side by side comparisons.

Pretty awesome! We got other excellent maternity photos as well. (Though I probably like the ones we did for her second child better...)

Two really fun shoots!

Yoga in the Park

I met Rita in a park near her home to do some portraits for her Yoga instruction. She teaches classes at Samadhi Yoga Studio and Breathe More Yoga. It was a somewhat humid but otherwise beautiful summer day.

As a special perk, it's a park I am quite familiar with, as I used to live right next to it. It was a lot of fun to revisit some stretches of familiar trails, and I found out they recently extended the trail network, so I will be back on a slightly cooler day in the future.

Nothing too fancy here - just looking for a simple, healthy, natural look to pair well with yoga, with a couple outfit changes to add some variety. Still, a really fun thing to do, and a bit of a break from the wedding season.

Winter Wonderland

Emily and Ed (adopters of my former chinchilla, incidentally) reached out to me for couple's portraits. I was so excited because they had a really fun, different idea: we waited for a good, solid snowfall and then met at Bancroft Castle. 

It's a beautiful location - cool ruined building, surrounded by beautiful rural New England vistas. And the snow was fresh and bright. Couldn't ask for more.

Unfortunately, we also managed to do it during a stretch of record-breaking cold, so it was an unusually bracing photo outing. Not that it slowed us down!

Every wedding, engagement, and portrait shoot has its own unique flavor and challenges, but it's really fun to do something so unusual. 

Thanks for being so game, Emily and Ed!

Perfect Strangers

During my slow season, I like to try to fit in a few projects that are fun and let me try something new. A few weeks ago I drove down to NYC to visit my friend Sarah Smallwood Parsons and her comedic partner Brittany McDonald, who run Perfect Strangers: A Character Show. I thought it'd be interesting to photograph some of their characters, and they did not disappoint.

It was such a good time and hilarious watching these two hop in and out of characters.

Only two things I would do differently next time. First, use my crumpled grey backdrop rather than the bare wall we used. I think the added texture would be good and it would look better under the colored background light.

The other is the background colors themselves. I had intended to do a variety of colors, but on the day of the shoot I wasn't liking how the colors looked in camera. I decided to stick to green/blue, probably the least appealing colors to me, figuring I could alter them in post processing.

Well... When I got home and dug into the photos, the color looked fine, but altering it in post did not work half as well as I'd expected. 

Kind of a shame. But then, that's exactly why I like doing these experiments once in a while. If I do a similar shoot again, I'll know how to use the background lights to get exactly the color I'm looking for.

In the meantime, I still love these photos, just on the strength of the subjects. They crack me up! If you're in NYC, visit their Facebook page and find a show you can go to.  Or you can meet Mickey Nutello, one of Sarah's characters and the one who inspired this project, in this video. (Audio is a little NSFW.)