Hazy Summer

This weekend 3 of my sweet friends and I got together for an afternoon to play around with our cameras and attempt to take some editorial style photos. Of course, before we got started, we had to enjoy some fantastic home-made cheese filled crepes, zuccini bars, and bloody marys. Not only can these girls shoot, they can cook too!

The idea for taking editorial style photos came out of the fact that most of the photography I do is more still life. It's hard to set up a time to organize a shoot where you're more in control of the way the set and subject matter looks that also involves people in some way. This was a fun challenge for me to take photos of people without taking portraits per se. We grabbed a couple props for some extra color, but didn't really have a theme of any kind. The main things I tried to focus on during this shoot was composition and color, playing with soft focus, lens flares, and movement. We tried to use props that could demonstrate movement in the photos like the dresses, hair, balloons, bubbles, and a scarf. We were lucky to have a nice breeze most of the day. It was definitely fun to put time aside to do a shoot like this. I know that I personally learned a lot. Especially after looking through the other girl's photos and critiquing what I liked about them. They're all so talented (and pretty too, aren't they)! I put a sampling of the photos we all took together up on my flickr site.

Thanks so much for an awesome afternoon girls! It was a great time on a muggy summer day.