This beautiful family came out to my home studio this week to capture some moments together after Colin recently returned from an overseas deployment.  I first met Taylor and Caiden last year during this deployment, when we took some photos for him at Christmastime.  She was nice enough to contact me for family photos upon his return and it's the most amazing thing to see a family reunited that obviously has so much love for each!  Caiden was super sweet and really smiled for mom and dad, but the faces he gave me had me cracking up during the entire shoot!  He'd smile at me, but as soon as I put my camera up he'd go serious again and lift an eyebrow, like, "What's she doing?"  He was just adorable!!  Taylor and Colin, I hope you guys enjoy these images for many years to come!  I know I enjoyed every minute of taking them with you and look forward to working together again, soon! :)

This summer The Potter's Hand Photography had the unique experience of participating in two traveling dress adventures!  The first was Miss Plum, whom I shot with my daughter one week prior to shooting Miss White (link to come later).  This dress is a gorgeous vintage all-lace wedding gown provided by a lovely lady named Beth, who picked it up at a local thrift store.  The gown is so tiny, I didn't have a model available for it, so a model call went out for petite ladies and I received an overwhelming response!  I will share a few images from each lovely lady!  This traveling dress was shot by quite a few professional photographers around the globe and you will find the link to the next adventure Miss White had at the end of my blog post.

The first model I shot was my own daughter, Lindsey, who is 9-years-old and certainly didn't fit the dress well.  However, she loved playing dressup in the gown and I challenged myself by shooting with the Lensbaby Composer Pro plus Edge 80 optic to blur certain aspects of the ill-fitting dress in-camera, rather than trying to create the blur in post. Blurring the dress while getting her face somewhat in focus was certainly a challenge--as anyone who has worked with the Lensbaby can probably attest.  I would swivel the composer all the way to one direction and then twist it and manually dial in focus where I wanted it. By doing so, I was able to capture some rather unique focus slicing with this lens and it helped to creatively style these images the way I envisioned them.  Enjoy!

My next lovely model was a young lady named Destiny and she's as beautiful as her name implies! <3  We had some fun with the Lensbaby as well and went downtown for a more urban setting after playing in the studio.  We shot this images right at midday so finding the right light and using buildings and bushes for shade was imperative to making these shots work.

Miss Isabel helped me create a fantastic studio portrait showcasing the entire dress and allowed me some fun shots outside battling some spotty daylight with a reflector:

 

Adrienne braved the mosquitoes in our wooded backyard and allowed me to get creative with the Lensbaby some more and we created a dark fairytale look:

And finally Mrs. Amanda came into the studio and we did some classic portraiture work and my little star kitten Brownie loved the dress and just layed there until we had her move:

To continue following Miss White's Adventure, please head over to my friend Kate Luber's Blog to see her fantastic high-fashion session with an elegant dancer!