Toward the end of July, I had the pleasure of back-to-back portraits on the porch: one little guy dropped by for pictures to celebrate his first birthday, and then a few days later a lovely lady honoured me with a visit to commemorate her 100th birthday. How awesome is that?
And how cute is this little guy??
I laughed when I was downloading the photos from my camera and saw this one, the very last shot I snapped that morning. Although he was sunny and agreeable throughout our session (truth be told, he made me ache for the days when my boys were wee like that!) I think he was clearly done with me and my camera by this point!
Isn’t he adorable? And then a few days later, I had the great pleasure of meeting Mrs Walker. The last time she sat for a formal portrait was, I kid you not, when her husband went off to war. Could I be more humbled? She was clearly a little less than comfortable at the beginning of our session, but as we chatted about her life and family, I could see her relax and her personality began to shine through.
Mrs Walker’s daughter, who had commissioned the portrait, sent me a lovely essay about her interesting life called, and I love this, “The first 100 years”. 🙂 Imagine the work these hands have done!
But there was more than porch portraits going on this week! There was, as I mentioned, a fun trip to the Museum of Nature:
I think this is one of my more unique family portraits. Next time I’ll have to bring a tripod to make sure mom gets in the picture.
I have not been able to resist the gorgeous flowers blooming all around me!
This is the new “matte” look that photographers seem to be gaga over right now. It means making the blacks very flat, almost grey, to pull the contrast out of the photo. I’m not a fan but I wanted to play with it. Hmm, not sure – what do you think?
Now textures, on the other hand – I love the texture effect!
(I love it even more since I got RAM for my computer as a birthday gift and Photoshop doesn’t choke when I try to open more than one file at a time!)
These are straight out of the camera – too bad they’re invasive weeds, cuz they’re lovely.
And squee! The best flowers of them all – sunflowers!!
(I will have a great story about sunflowers later this week. Stand by!)
And of course, I love best of all the photos of the boys that will tell the story of our summer for years to come. Not formal portraits, not staged, not usually planned – just boys being boys.
(What, you don’t think that last one qualifies as ‘boys being boys’? One of his goals for the summer was to learn to knit, so I taught him!)
What’s your summer been like so far?
And by the way, I have a great family portrait session booked for next week (I am really excited about it!) but do have a few days left for summer portraits, or some early back-to-school portraits. The fall is lovely but insanely busy, so if you’re thinking of autumn portraits with the fall colours, please get in touch soon!
