My First Pro Post: The L & M Families

I have decided that from here on in, I will keep my personal blogs separate from my professional blogs, but I certainly invite everyone to follow both :) (Follow my other blog at http://www.morethanonethousandwords.blogspot.com/)

I did a double shoot last Sunday morning, for the L & M families. I got to L's home (which is the location that they chose for our shoot) and they had already set up a nice little area for photos in their front yard. There were even small stacks of hay for the children to sit on- how perfect for some nice, crisp, fall photos! They were strategically placed under a tree, but our first issue arose when I realized that either the shingles from the house, or the cars and street would fall in the background. I did my best to a) get into positions that would limit my view of the house shingles (and completely avoid the street) and b) clone in extra bushes in photoshop. For the most part, I succeeded, with, of course, a few exceptions here and there.

The kids were really a lot of fun. K was 5 years old, R was 3, and J was just an itty-bitty 2.5 months old! K was very cooperative and did almost everything we asked of her (including a kiss to her little cousin!). R was adorable! He only wanted to pose if he was going to be the only one in the photo! And little J was such a trooper; our shoot lasted 2 hours and he was SO good! He even let me get some good sleepy shots at the end :)

After we were done with our outdoor photos, I suggested that we move inside to get photos of the cloth-less baby! (Normally, I HATE indoor lighting conditions, but I definitely had to make an exception to get that adorable, brand new, baby skin!


I had some definite lighting issues while indoors. The room with the most light in it had trees outside the windows and big window panes, which of course, filtered the light coming through, making it quite spotty. At the time, I thought it wasn't too bad and nothing that I couldn't fix in Photoshop. After I got home, though, I realized that it was a little bit worse than I had first thought. I suppose I could have fixed it all with countless hours of cloning and masking, but really, who wants to do that?! They weren't too bad, and I did offer the family a chance to do another mini-session to get those photos that we might have missed out on due to tough lighting situations. All in all, it was a great session and I did manage to get some great photos! A big thank you to the L & M families for allowing me to use some of the photos that I took of their beautiful children to help build my portfolio!

I want to throw in a disclaimer down here that the colors/resolution look absolutely HORRIBLE on this website and not at all like what they ACTUALLY look like in real life!