time together…

walking around the lake with my little girl & her balloons & her awesome outfit on that she picked out herself, it felt so good. her laughing & talking & running & me snapping away on my camera.

i have always loved photography but in this moment i realized what it has given me with all of my kids & right now especially with Sophia, it gives us time together.

we can go out for a walk, out driving around scouting for good spots for photos, to the park, to the lake, to a cornfield, a downtown alley, to a pretty field off the side of the road, wherever we go it really doesn’t matter because we are connecting.

i am thankful for this time…

I read something on one of my favorite photographer’s blog a few months ago & it has really stuck with me. her name is Tara Whitney & she is amazing. she said that some of her favorite shots, especially from family shoots are the “in between shots” the moments as you are setting up your next shot, those are the moments to capture. the moments where you may get some beautiful blur or maybe the “wrong” thing in the photo is in focus & your subjects are not. she said that those are the moments where you can tell the whole story. whether it is your own children, a family shoot, a table full of junk, whatever it is you are photographing it for a reason & sometimes that reason isn’t always in focus, it isn’t always cropped to perfection, the light may be leaking harsh to one side, whatever it is it will help to tell the true & whole story.

we all know that the whole story to any story is never “perfection”

I have been reading a lot about the manipulation of my camera. I have been learning more & more about my settings, light, placement, blur, fstop, shutter speed, all of it & I love walking into a situation, looking at the light or lack of it, looking at the movement & getting pretty close to where I need to be with the settings on my camera. of course, then I tweak those settings as we go to experiment & to learn.

i have always known that i love photography but in the last year that passion has been reignited immensely. i love the beautiful shot but i think that i love the shot that tells a bigger story even more.

playing with light & blur…

one of my favorite shots from the day. to me it tells the bigger story of her childhood & her joy & what makes her happy. movement & playing & sunshine & balloons, those things make this little girl happy…

Sophia playing with her light & shadows…

a lot of these pictures may look the same at first but they are completely different. the focus & light & reflection & movement & depth of field are different between each shot & so each one has its own story to tell. i love to see the difference between the ones where i let more light into the camera & the balloons are brighter with more reflection & the sky is a lighter blue & then the ones where not as much light was let in, the sky becomes darker & pulls your eyes up.

seriously, she loved this part & it is my favorite too. she loved walking into those tall weeds towards the water, she does it every time we go & she laughs the whole time every time…