Lost In A Sea of Blue

What can I say?  I love the perplexed look on his face.

My best wishes to Heather and Tim who were married on a lovely afternoon in May.  The wind subsided and the clouds lightened just in time for the pictures and ceremony.  A wonderful start to a wonderful life together!

A Comforting Moment

Sometimes the best image from a photo session isn’t the one I planned at all.  Here our little Charlotte was not very happy about having her portrait done and there was quite a bit of crying.  So while Dad comforted his daughter, I took advantage of the lovely afternoon light coming in their living room window to take this unposed image of Dad and baby together.

Actually, I enjoy photographing people in their own homes.  There are challenges, of course.  I have to work with whatever is there and often that means messy backgrounds.  But new locations are also full of new opportunities for posing, for lighting and –  for backgrounds.   It keeps me creative and, in this case, allowed Charlotte’s brothers to take a nap while she was the subject of the camera’s attention.

Summer Music

It is fun and sometimes quite amazing to see what happens when I play in Photoshop a bit by blending edit layers to achieve the ultimate result I am looking for.  I often don’t know when I start where I will end up.  It is the cumulative effect of layers, one over the other, that can result in such dramatic images as the one here.  This is fun!  I started with an image I took last week when I went with Gordon to listen to the Pigs Eye Dixieland Jass Band play at a festival in New Richmond, Wisconsin.  I loved the setting – a recreated farmstead and little prairie town.  The music was wonderful and the dancing just added to the whole atmosphere.  The image was nice, but it didn’t do justice to the feel of the event.  But after about a half hour of experimentation – voila!  I like the rim of white around the buildings.  What do you think?

We enjoyed a lot of summer music last week – the Dixieland concert in New Richmond,  Tchaikovsky at Orchestra Hall as part of the Sommerfest celebration and German Polkas at Como Park Pavilian.  These were all free concerts – my favorite kind.   You’ll have to wait until next year for the next free day of music at Sommerfest and I’ll let you know the next time the Pigs Eye Jazz Band has a concert.  Music in the Parks (St. Paul) continues through September 7th.  Here’s a link for the calendar:  www.stpaul.gov