This was a fun image to create. I had the dancer poses in a number of positions, slowly going from the floor to fully standing. After the shoot, I combined my five favorite dance portrait poses to merge into one panoramic image. We ended up printing a canvas gallery wrap and it looked amazing on the wall of her home.
The first time I met Kaila was back when she needed a headshot and some dance portraits for an upcoming audition. A little under two years later, I was hit with a strong desire to get outside and do some shooting just for fun; the weather was the perfect mix of cool air and warm sun, the days were getting shorter and I knew that the dark evenings of winter would soon be upon us.
So I did the only thing I logically could: I called up Kaila’s mom and asked if they would be game for a just-for-fun shoot in… oh… thirty minutes or so? Luckily, I caught them on the one day of the week that had nothing going on. They scrambled to get ready, I scrambled to get ready. We met up and headed to the nearest location I could think of: a nearby elementary school.
The elementary school actually ended up being quite a good location. Between the various play ground and picnic areas filled with old oak trees, the area was pretty scenic. Pair that in with a few good brick walls and chain link fences and we were golden.
The sun set pretty quickly but we had enough time to get a slew of beautiful photos. Time well spent on a random evening in good ole Central Texas.
My friend Emilie and I get together every now and again to shoot some portraits, just for the joy of creating images. Sometimes we have certain look in mind, or perhaps a location to try out; other times we just make it up as we go along. But this time we were in store for something new.
Emilie’s friend Kim Lubas is a hair stylist just arriving in the Austin area. She was interested in doing a collaboration with herself as hairstylist, Emilie acting as model and me at the camera. It sounded like a great idea, so we scheduled a time to meet up.
The goal for the shoot was to basically show off what Kim could do with fake hair (which if I hadn’t seen her putting the hair in, I would have never know the difference). Some of the hair was different colors, some was naturally colored.
One of Emilie’s friend who is interested in photography came along to hang out and watch. Kim decided that she was going to give him a new hair-do, so we got him in front of the camera as well. My then-fiance-now-wife Lindsay arrived home from work while we were shooting: Kim grabbed her as well and added a purple streak to Lindsay’s dark hair. I was lucky I was photographing otherwise I may have gotten grabbed too.
The shoot concluded and we said our goodbyes, tired but happy with the way everything went. It ended up being extremely difficult to narrow down the images, but we persevered and found a good selection of winners to add to Kim’s portfolio. My thanks to Kim, Emilie, Chris and Lindsay for a great time and a great shoot.
It was in late May that I received a call from a friend whose engagement photos I had done a couple months back. It was an emergency. Her wedding was in two weeks and the bridal portraits she had done did not turn out well. She lives in Houston, but as luck had it, I was that way the upcoming weekend for an engagement party my parents friends were throwing Lindsay and I. (It was a Stock-the-Wine-Cellar Party… we just now ran out of red wine). I do not normally do much in the way of wedding photography, but I was ready to help out and save the day.
We met up early that Saturday morning while the sun was still low to avoid the sweltering Texas heat as well as to take advantage of the early-morning light. Using the internet and Google Street View, I was able to scout out a location in advance.
I had discovered the Katy Heritage Society, a non-profit group devoted to preserving Old Katy’s historic buildings and homes. At the Katy Heritage Society Park itself, they had collected a number of historic homes as well as a nicely manicured (and green!) lawn, a rarity given the drought the area had been facing. In all it was a perfect location for a set of emergency bridal portraits.
Kelsey looked great and we had a great time creating beautiful portraits with the laughing help of her mom and one of my local photographer friends. After the shoot, I was able to get Kelsey the proofs quickly so she could choose her favorites to display at her wedding reception.
Crisis successfully diverted.
It isn’t every day that you get to work with world renowned percussion soloist and concert marimbist. But that is exactly what I got to do when Tom Burritt needed new artwork for his upcoming CD release, Groundlines.
With such an album title, I knew that we needed warm earth tones and preferably a lot of rock which is far superior to dirt in many cases… including this one. Tom told me about a place out in The-Middle-of-Nowhere, Central Texas that served as an amazing arts and antique community called Round Top. In Round Top, there is an area called Festival Hill which has an amazing concert hall that looks like it straight out of Lord of the Rings and a chapel hall that was originally built in 1883 before it was moved to Festival Hill. The area underneath the chapel is now a coffee shop with great stone arches and a vaulted ceilings of stone. Best yet, it was remarkably cooler than the 100 or so degrees that the Texas summer was throwing at us.
We had a relatively small shot list: a image of Tom with is marimba, a couple of portraits of Tom with a relatively clean background for copy text and an image of his mallets that could be used as the art on the actual CD. Here is the first shot that we put together for the album cover, followed by what it looked like after the title and other text was added in by a graphic designer later.
With the two following portraits of Tom that we did inside the actual coffee shop, we allowed plenty of space on the stone walls to add track listings and write ups later.
We were trying to find a good way to incorporate Tom’s signature mallets. I noticed that the paving stones that made up the floor were nice and textures with the scrapes and scratches of many feet and chairs. So after choosing the most optimal paving stone, we placed the mallets down on the floor.
The images turned out great; we wrapped up and went to the local hangout for a bite to eat and a cold beer. Thanks Tom for the great shoot and good time.
You can listen to Tom’s new CD here.
