Split session for Sarah: Turlock Senior Portraits

While I'm pretty much caught up on work, I'm way behind on sharing. This is a two part senior portrait session where the first part was done in fall and the latter in spring. The crazy thing about it is that the photos from fall look like they were done in spring and vice versa. That said, I had a great time with Sarah on both shoots.

Our lead photo this week I put a little extra attention into. It's not one of the ones that Sarah chose, but as I was going back through her catalog to get her order ready, I paused at it and thought back to when I shot it. I can distinctly remember commenting on how beautiful I thought it was. Then when I loaded them into a gallery for her I remember pausing again and thinking that I should edit it but I went with the color powder shot because of Sarah's work with Red Zone. This last time, as I readied her invitations for print I thought of what a shame it was that no one else would ever see this photo.

I looked at the clock. It was probably about 10 in the evening. The kids were in bed, it was quiet but for Pandora playing in the background. As always, I still had lots of work to do but the artist in me pleaded with me to let him play with this shot. About two and a half hours later I made myself stop experimenting with textured layers and inverted masks.

In the end I learned some new things about textures and layer masks, but most importantly I learned how refreshing it is to the soul to be allowed time to breathe every once in a while.

Lovely wooded shot at CSU Stanislaus

Cinder block wall providing some depth to this portrait.

This stuff gets EVERYWHERE. I'll never shoot with it again, but at least I can say that I tried it once.

It took FOREVER to get this shot, and it's still not how I wanted it, but it's still pretty cool none-the-less.

The benefit to splitting the shoot into two was that Sarah was able to see that she liked more spontaneous, natural light shots more than my more dramatic, lit shots.

"Okay, now no smile." Works every time.

Not how I typically take this shot, but I like it.

The amount of hair that was blowing in this shot was INSANE. It was like we were in a wind tunnel.With a little care and attention to detail, I was able to pull much of the scattered strands out of the shot and off of her face.