Michelle's Baby Shower

This past Sunday I headed over to Michelle and Mike's to document their baby shower. It was such a nice relaxed party, they have such good friends and neighbors.

Here is the happy couple.
We will be doing a belly session for Michelle in a couple weeks, let that belly pop a little more.

I am in love with their view!
I have photographed in this building before, but not this high up. I could stare out that window for hours!

Oh my gosh this little girl was the life of the party! There could not have been a better cheerleader for having children than this cutie. She loved having her photo taken and at one point she came and tapped me on the leg to take her picture. Too darn cute.

They had a fantastic spread of goodies, I am so hungry now after looking through the food shots, will need to go make myself some lunch.

Lovely day for a baby shower.

Michelle's close friend is also pregnant, due at the same time but with twins!

I seriously could not get enough of this child!

Michelle and Mike you guys are fantastic, thank you so much for having me out!
I hope you enjoy your photographs, see you soon.

Enjoy your slideshow!

Helping hand with MANNA

Friday a group of wedding photographers met up to help prepare meals for MANNA. Sofia does a lot of work through out the year for this organization, when she called on us get volunteers to lend a helping hand we were all there happy to jump in.

Here is the group of us, flattering hairnet and all.

Annie Hosfeld (missing from this photo, boohoo she had to leave right before we took it), Missy Sowden, Ryan Estes, Gordon Smith, Heather Fowler, Stephanie Nolt, Sofia Negron, Jackie Bayne, me, and Geoffrey Horowitz.

Jackie and Sofia looking oh so pretty! (They are going to kill me for posting this.)

Me and Heather sporting our fabulous hairnets.

Heather was really excited for me to take this photograph.

Ryan, who knew a hairnet could look so good?

We bagged a ton of cereal!I stole these last few from Jackie's site, she has more on her blog make sure you head over there to check it out.

I just find this photo hilarious!

I don't think I can work the hairnet as well as Ryan can, it is much more flattering on him.

It was really great to get out of the office and do some good for people in need. MANNA is a great organization and I am happy to have been able to contribute in some small way.

Jenna's amazing belly shoot

I am so excited to share this image. I am just in love with it. Jenna and Jeff are awesome and we had a great time during our shoot a few weeks ago. You will have take my word when I say the rest of the images are just as awesome. This image is in my top three from their shoot.

I can't wait to go back when the baby arrives. Thank you for having me out!

Baby Esmee

Saturday was a great day, not only did I get to spend the morning at Nuala's party but after that I headed out to meet baby Esmee. Oh my goodness this little girl will steal your heart. She was so funny and all about the camera, all about the smiles and surprising her parents. My cheeks were sore when I left their house from laughing and smiling so much.

Meet Esmee

What did I tell you? This was Esmee after only a few minutes of me being there.

Too cute!

Elodie and Eric are really great with Esmee, Elodie is French so she speaks to Esmee in French and Eric covers the English side of things. They are a super cute family.

Bath time!

I am always excited when the children I photograph surprise their parents when I am there. Esmee discovered her tongue, she was so interested in it and kept making super funny faces.

I just love this little moment between father and daughter.

I found a cute little song that I thought really went well with how our session went and has an added little French flair! You can't help but smile.

Enjoy your Slideshow!

Nuala's 2nd Birthday

Saturday was Nuala's 2nd birthday, and I had the privilege of being there again for the party. It has been such a pleasure watching this little girl grow up! You can check out last years birthday here.

So serious at first yet so adorable!

She was very excited, within the first five minutes of my being at the house two different presents were dropped off. She could hardly wait to open them.

The party was held at the Fleisher Art Memorial, they did a superb job of setting up all sorts of fun crafty stations for the kidos. Nuala's first stop was to make a button.

Print making for two year olds.

Painting fun with vegetables.

Rebecca and Kevin are awesome parents, so proud of their little girl and a good looking couple.

Very happy family!

The end of the party was crazy! All the kids got balloons and they were having the time of their lives running around the room with them.
Nuala went from having just one balloon to having eight!

Of course I feel special when the parents request a photo of me with their child.

I can't believe how fast Nuala is growing up and that I have been able to document so many stages in her life starting from when she was still in the belly!

Be sure to check out the slideshow, you should recognize some of the kids from the party last year and from some of my other moodybaby photo sessions.

Tracy's Belly Shoot

A couple weeks ago I met up with Tracy and Mike for a belly shoot. They are such an adorable couple and both are super excited for their new baby, the sex of the baby is going to be a surprise. If I had to guess I would lean towards a girl. We will see. We had a ton of fun changing outfits and locations throughout the house for photos. I picked up the film earlier this week, which is always exciting and here are a couple of my favorites.



Aren't they just adorable? The light throughout the house was awesome and I don't think there is one bad photo from the whole shoot! Congratulations you two I can not wait to hear when the baby is born.

The fundamentals

Lately I have been thinking back to when I first took up photography. It was a lot different back then and it makes me feel really old when I say that! But really I am so thankful that I experienced the fundamentals of basic photography early on. Today just about anyone can go out and buy a pro or semi pro camera and call themselves photographer, but if you handed them a light meter and a manual camera they wouldn't know what to do with it.

What got me into thinking about the fundamentals and what made me fall in love with photography. The other day when I opened up a couple of frames to swap the photos and use the mattes that I had already cut for the Perkins competition. The photographs that I pulled from those mattes were real silver prints. The nostalgia of slaving away hours at a time came over me when looking at those images again. I would spend the entire day in the darkroom just to get one perfect print and sometimes that didn't even happen. I really miss those days.

Last week I was talking to Jacob at the CT PUG about working in the darkroom. He had complimented me on my belly photography saying that he could tell I didn't do any post processing on the images, no photoshoping to get an effect. We had a laugh talking about the thrill of working in the darkroom, setting up the enlarger and to burn or dodge a photograph you would make any obnoxious tool to you could. You cut holes in cardboard, taped objects to the end of a wire hanger, anything to give you the right shape to direct the light when exposing your paper. I would do exercises in my darkroom while exposing the paper. If I had a two or three minute exposure I would do any number or squats while listening to the monotone ticker of the timer. Ahh the good old days.
The real thrill was taking that piece of paper and putting it into the developer to see if you got it right or not. Either way you would still have to go through at least two more baths before you could go back to your enlarger and try again. This process took time, lots of time. I was really anal in the darkroom, very careful and very clean. I learned from some really great people.
Now I sit at my desk all day sifting through thousands of photographs from one job to the other. No more squats while working on a photograph, although that might be an interesting experiment.
Digital photography has certainly not had any effect on my love of photography, don't get me wrong, I am just thankful that I know where I came from and respect the fundamentals. I think this is why I use my medium format Hasselblad to photograph my pregnant bellies. You can not get the same feel or quality with digital for that stuff. I have tried it, it is not the same. I enjoy going back to basics, taking a step back and remembering why I love what I do so much. It is really simple.

This is the belly that started it all! My roommates friend was pregnant when I was doing my photography thesis on body landscapes so I asked if I could photograph her. This is my most famous body landscape from that series, it was purchased at my senior show by the Princeton University Museum of Art.

I started off shooting weddings with my hasselblad as well! Today I can not even imagine doing this! Here a few images from the very first weddings I did.

John & Amy Gruber

Mike & Kelly Froio

My handsome brother, I adore this photograph.

Ahh, the memories. I love my Hasselblad, I love my Nikon's too just in different ways. Here is my old girl, ok well she's not so old she was a graduation present from my dad back in 1999. I got it a year before graduation specifically so I could use it for my senior thesis.

I love her.

So there ya go, my little bit of nostalgia for the day. Now back to work, I am going to experiment with some squats in front of the computer today.

I would love to hear some "back in the day" photography stories from you.

Shooting with Ryan

A couple of weeks ago I shot a really fun wedding with Ryan Estes. This guy is super busy and you can see why! He was a ton of fun to shoot with. We have been friends and sending referrals each others way for a while now, but this was the first time we actually got to shoot together. I am looking forward to shooting with him again.

He is such a hamb.

Here are a two of my favorites

Jessica and Dustin were a great couple and up for any ideas we threw their way, Jessica had a fantastic time posing with the school bus.

Really, how can you not have fun at a wedding when shooting with this guy?Of course Ryan got a shot of me too. Its something photographers just like to do when coming out to shoot with each other. We don't have many photos of ourselves in action so its almost obligatory to take a few shots of each other.

You can see Ryan's post about Jessica and Dustins wedding on his blog.

Exciting couple of days!

The last two days have been a whirl wind! Yesterday I drove up to New Haven Connecticut for the monthly CT PUG meeting. Before I left the house I received notice that a belly print of mine was selected for the annual Perkins Center Photography exhibition, this year it is Photography 27. It is pretty competitive to get in, I made it in only once before, so I was really excited. I submitted three images, one is definitely in and the other is a "maybe" which means it depends on the hanging space and the decision of the judges. The maybe is the shot of Danica and the other one is a photograph of Jean that has never made it online. I invite anyone who is in the area to come out for the opening on Jan 26th!
So needless to say the beginning of my day started out pretty great yesterday and to top it off I hit zero traffic and made it to CT in the record time of three hours! I got to hang out with Justin and Mary a bit before the meeting and they were super gracious to let me sleep on their couch last night.
On to the PUG meeting. This was HUGE pug meeting! J Sandifer was there from Livebooks to give a demo of their awesome website offerings and to educate us on the importance of websites and prominence online. The thing for me that makes their sites so desirable is what they offer on the back-end and the ease of use. J had guaranteed Justin and Mary that if they got 50 people to come out to the meeting for his demo that he would give a site away for free. So you can imagine the draw this was. I went up to support them in this endeavor and add to the numbers as well as network and meet some new people. You can imagine my surprise and total excitement when my number was drawn from the bag for the website! J totally had me sold with his presentation and my mind was already working trying to think of what I would need to do to set up a site with them. I could not believe it, cannot believe it, I am so excited.

J giving his presentation.

Justin and Mary, the CT PUG leaders.

Me with Justin, Mary, and J.

and of course me and Mary!

CT has an amazing PUG. Not only did 50 people come out for this meeting, but 54 people came out! That is such an amazing number. I am so envious of their PUG. We chilled with the PUG until well after midnight!
The excitement doesn't stop there folks! This morning I had an awesome breakfast with M and J before heading into NYC to meet up with Don and his good friend John Gruber of Daring Fireball to check out the set of a commercial Don did the shooting boards for. I can not divulge much information about the commercial BUT I will say it stars an amazing director. When it comes out on TV I will let you know which one it is. I am sorry to be such a tease but I really can't say anything about it. Don does shooting boards for a lot of really cool commercials, one of the fed-ex commercials aired during the super bowl last year and recently he did the boards for AMEX starring Tina Fay. I am sure you have seen it. He got to watch the filming of that one too. He has a good/rewarding job.
In summary; I made it into a print competition, got to see good friends, meet new people, won a free website and watched the filming of a commercial. Doesn't get much better than that.

Fun website for the mom to be.

I came across this site today and had to share it, babystrology.com.
You can find baby names based on meanings and origins, you can create a countdown ticker for when the baby is going to be born (cool tool for mom's with blogs). You can buy stuff, learn stuff and have fun. I thought it was pretty cool, if you are pregnant or planning to be check this out!

Happy New Year

I hope everyone had a safe and happy new year! Don and I decided to keep things kinda low key this year and we couldn't think of anyone better to spend New Years Eve with other than our good friends Linette and Kyle. Don and Kyle had a great time playing Guitar Hero and Linette and I enjoyed watching.

Linette and Kyle.

(on a technical side note these images were taken with my brand new super fantastic D300 at 3200 ISO!)

New years kiss compliments of Linette.

We got up much later today than we had anticipated but to our advantage the Mummers parade had been postponed 4 hours due to some morning rain. So Don and I geared up on the scooter and headed down to south Philly to catch some of the new year cheer.

I feel bad because I am not up on my mummers parade info. I don't know what these guys were called but there were a ton of them prancing around, many were just drunk and happy. We witnessed one guy stumble into the crowd hit a street sign and stumble head first back into the street, ahh good times at the Philadelphia New Years Parade.
(he was ok, don't worry.)

Another froggy guy, I received a froggy sticker and some beads from these guys.

One of the mummers is challenging this guy to a sound battle, he was blowing as hard as he possibly could.

The first self portrait in the new year.

We met up with our good friends Joe and Lindsey.

Campbells' soup girl

I really enjoy how much effort goes into getting ready for this parade. These guys are outside for a long time and they make a huge trek down Broad Street up to City Hall, I can only imagine how tired they are at the end of the day.

We enjoyed this guy in the canoe.

And last but not least I think this is my favorite of the day.

I plan on putting together some new year goals and resolutions, but for now I am going to relax for the rest of the evening and maybe make a nice cup of hot coco.

Happy New Year!