Tiny Ballerina

March 19, 2018

It was great to see this family again for baby girl #3.  She is one lucky baby to have two big sisters to teach her their dance moves.

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Fall Glow

November 22, 2017

I’ve had the honor of photographing this extended family for many years… from maternity and newborn photos to where we were today, with a big family group.  We had the warm fall sun shining bright this morning, so I decided to embrace the sun flare in the photos.

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In the Christmas Spirit

November 15, 2017

I’m grateful that this little girl’s mom asked for some holiday-themed studio portraits this morning.  It forced me to step a little outside of my normal studio work and tried a little something different with the Christmas lights.  I think they look especially nice with the closeup.  Our little model took a little while to loosen up, but by the end she was having a blast dancing around in her adorable puffy vest and boots.

 

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Stripes all Around

November 6, 2017

I’ve lost count of how many years I’ve been doing family photos for this family, but it’s so nice to see the boys growing up and get a chance to photograph them year after year.

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Warm Fall Days

October 25, 2017

It has been a little while since I’ve added some new photos to the blog.  I’ve been busy with my volunteer photography at the Fairfax County Animal Shelter, and I recently started an Instagram account featuring some of my shelter pet portraits (@shelterpetart).  But this week I was back outside for some fall portraits with this lovely family and their sweet pup.  He has grown quite a bit since I met him at our session last fall.

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Number 4

July 6, 2017

I first met this family many years ago with their older daughters, and now they were back with baby #4, a new baby girl.  In fact, I photographed mom and her middle daughter for Alexandria Woman magazine a few years back.  It was so fun to see them again with their new baby sister, who was very interested in keeping her eyes on what everyone else was up to in the studio.

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Pet Family

April 4, 2017

A new type of family portrait for me today: pups!  Three of them live together and the 4th lives with their human grandfather.  They all came dressed to impress with some gorgeous collars.

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March Bar Mitzvah

March 8, 2017

It was an honor to help capture this important milestone in this boy’s life.  It has been several years since I last photographed this family and their sons have both grown up to be such polite little men.

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Actions in Action

February 22, 2017

The kind folks at SleekLens offered me the opportunity to try out their Portrait Perfection Collection actions.  I was a little reluctant as first because after over a decade in the portrait photography business, I am a little set in my ways and have done little to update my editing workflow after I found something that worked for me.  But I thought it might be fun to take a look at what they had and see how I could make it work for me. 

I used two personal photos that were underexposed as a result of shooting as the sun was rapidly setting as samples.

The first photo was one that I took at the beach and it actually popped back up on my Facebook feed recently.  It bothered me that the photo was a little dark and the girls’ skin didn’t have the warm look I had hoped for.  Because I was new to this set of actions it took a little trial and error to figure out what would work best for this photo.  Luckily, many of the actions have pretty obvious names, so I was able to jump around without having to do too much research.

I used the BASE- From Golden Hours, followed by EXPOSURE-Bright.  Then I used the PORTRAIT RETOUCH-Honey Skin Brush one their skin, COLOR CORRECTION-Purple Honey on the girls’ white dresses, COLOR CORRECTION-Reduce Greens on the water, and finally I added a brown vignette, which I found under VIGNETTE-Toned Vignette. 

The second photo I chose was a portrait of my daughter.  Again the original photo was dark because the sunlight was going down faster than I had kept up with my exposure.  So I wanted to brighten up the photo and also soften up her skin and add a little more softness to the photo in general. 

I started with BASE-From Scratch and EXPOSURE-Bright.  I used Soft Glow Skin and Honey Skin Brush from the PORTRAIT RETOUCH just on her face, which gave her skin a softer texture.  I used the LIGHT GLOW-Soft Warm to add some more highlights to her hair.  I brightened her eyes using the 20% Brush and reduced some reds using the COLOR CORRECTION.  Finally I added a brown vignette and used the Paint Effect from FROM A CANDY STORE.  Here’s what it looked like in Photoshop while I was working:

As with most action sets I have purchased, I found that there is a bit of a learning curve in figuring out what is available to you and selecting which actions will work best for each particular image.  This set covers a lot of portrait retouching needs and I’m sure I am just at the beginning of the possibilities that it offers.

If you would like to learn more about these actions offered by SleekLens you can find them here:

https://sleeklens.com/product-category/photoshop-actions/

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Pink Baby Bear

February 16, 2017

This was our third time around with a newborn session (I had done sessions for big brothers too 🙂 ) and baby sister was so patient the whole morning.  We were even able to replicate the family’s favorite teddy bear hat pose, this time with a little girlie flair.

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