Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

In Vanity Fair’s September 2010 issue, there was a poll asking people several questions.  One of the questions was,  ”The King Tut exhibition is currently in the U.S., showing the objects that were buried with him in his tomb, because the Egyptians believed the pharaoh could take things with him into the afterlife. If you could take one of these objects with you to use in the afterlife, which would you take?’ The choices were..

a family photo album (47%)

a pet (25%)

an iPhone or Blackberry (9%)

A favorite car (5%)

A big screen TV (3%)

Our family photos are mostly being stored on computers, rarely printed, no longer put in albums, and ultimately not looked at very often!  We are taking more photographs than ever before in history… and we aren’t doing much to care for these family photos for future generations of our own families.  Ask any computer technician how many people they work with who have lost ALL of their family photos on their hard drive that crashed because they had no backup.  It is common today, unfortunately.  And the statistics in restoring those family photos from a crashed hard drive  are painfully low.  

Let’s start creating photo albums again.  Years and years from now, no one is going to feel a CD or DVD pull at their heart strings as they rummage through old memorabilia!  But if they were printed images of family members, friends, pets, vacations, and cherished memories, these tangible photos would be little priceless pieces of the past that family would hang onto, preserve, pass down.  This is what they were talking about in the survey, NOT our hard drives. 

I briefly touch upon how I am guilty of not printing family snapshots and how I’m turning a new leaf in a post entitled Capturing The Moments That Matter Most.  It’s been great fun to go through my personal photos, choose the ones that make me smile, print them, and store them in my acid-free box that I created marked “Our Family 2010.”  Finally.  Our friends and family are enjoying the little capture moments on our coffee table. 

Now I’m hoping I can encourage more of you to create tangible treasures of those scads of images you’ve left unattended on your hard drives!  Photograph, back up, burn, AND PRINT!

My husband and I just came back from a vacation to the upper parts of Michigan.  We try to go every year.  It gives us an opportunity to reconnect, spending uninterupted time together enjoying the beauty of Michigan during peak weather here.  I didn’t touch a computer for 10 days.  That was very foreign for a self-described computeraholic like me.  The only thing I needed on vacation was my husband and my cameras!!  LOL.  He’s okay with not being my one and only, as long as he’s my first choice. Being married to a photographer must have its pitfalls.

We visited friends and relatives and spent the rest of the time wandering beaches and shoreline and interesting sites in Michigan that we take for granted or haven’t seen since we were children like the Soo Locks and Tahquamenon Falls.  We didn’t keep track of time, we didn’t have a schedule, we just wandered and enjoyed.  Oh, I let him beat me at putt-putt golf. If you ever get to Petoskey, it’s the best putt-putt course anywhere!

Michigan is surely beautiful.  I think the thing that always strikes me the most when we travel elsewhere is the lush greenness of Michigan. Ireland was the only place I’ve seen that’s as green and it’s green in a different way.  

Here are a few of my favorites from our summer vacation for you to enjoy. It’s hard to spot, but there’s a surfer in the water in this image taken in Charlevoix. Crazy guy! The sand was whipping my face so hard I could barely see but he was joyfully riding the waves…. in Michigan. Go figure.

As a photographer, I should get tired of pressing that shutter but, ironically, I never do.  I even dragged my tripod on vacation and used it one time; to snap this photo of Rod and I. I get lots of great photos of ‘stuff’ on vacation and once and a while of him but never him and I. So glad I dragged it along! LOL.

I love working with people like I do.  When I get together with clients to create portraits for them, they are ‘up’, happy, and excited.  Even when they’re nervous, it’s something we work through very quickly.  New clients often comment on how painless their portrait session is in comparison to what they thought it would be.  So many of my regular clients have become friends. 

As a photographer, I get to be ‘inside’ the most wonderful moments of people’s lives; whether it’s a wedding, an engagement photo session, or parents with their newborn baby.  I LOVE it! 

People talk about retiring.  I can’t imagine.  I am blessed to love what I do enough that if I couldn’t do it for a living, I’d do it for free.  I hope to keep photographing like Ruth Bernhard, until my hands can no longer hold a camera because I’m 92!

We photographed a beautiful wedding recently and my clients sent these flowers with a lovely note that made me cry as well as leaving me a message on my cell phone that I will keep always. 

Thank you to all of you who believe enough in me to let me do what I love and share it with you. 

Zoey

I’m not big on carrying a camera around.  Yet, of late, I’ve decided that I need to photograph my personal life more.  I seem to be so busy creating portrait photography for other people that I often let the moments of my own life slip by.  And that can be a very bad thing since there is no one in my family remotely interested in holding a camera let alone using one!  So candid portraits, even snapshots, here I come.

On a recent warm summer evening, we had dinner outside with our kids and our granddaughter. ’Z’ always steals the show. None of us pay any attention to anything but her discoveries and delight of the most simple things.  She loves music and dances to everything including commercials.  She does yoga poses because she’s figured out it makes everyone laugh, especially when she’s stark naked which is a good deal of the time in the summer by our pool. She says “Mmmmm” whenever she tastes something good and blows kisses to everyone and anyone like her life depends on it. How can anyone not love babies?!

It’s occurred to me lately that I rarely take snapshot photos let alone print them. I’m too concerned with getting ‘the perfect shot.’  So I’m trying to turn a new leaf.  Tiny moments matter so much in our lives. They are here and with a whisper they are gone.  Get out your camera! Catch it.  It doesn’t matter if it’s perfect.  It matters that you have something to remember it by.  That’s my new motto for a while.

As our granddaughter grows, I want to catch it all.  Her mommy grew up in a split second. One day she was a tiny tot with her pony tail blowing in the wind and before I knew it she had grown up on me.  I have a chance to savor the moments more this time.  We intend to do just that.  I’m going to keep her one day a week (Mondays) for our daughter while she goes off to nursing school. Don’t worry, I will be exercising and eating my vitamins to make sure I have the stamina!

I’ve taken hundreds of photos of this sweet child since she was born 18 months ago. I love so many of them. But how ironic that my favorite portrait of her was one I grabbed on a hot summer evening just enjoying her thoroughly and snapping away mindlessly as she played. When I saw this image, it took my breath away. She so reminds me of her mother when she was tiny. Someone said ‘Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of moments that take our breath away.’

Get your camera out. Don’t let the moments slip away. Document them. Print them. Save them. Treasure them.

2009 Detroit Professional Photographer of the Year

I began challenging myself and started entering the International Photographic Competition last year that PPA holds once a year.  I do it for a few reasons; one is to earn merit points towards my master’s degree in photography and the other is to continue to improve and excel in my craft.

PPA’s International Photographic Competition is a world-renowned photographic competition, where entries are evaluated against a standard of excellence (not against each other). PPA states the following as to the benefits of competing:

• Increase your skill and confidence in your craft. Competition forces you to look deeper at your own photography. It helps you see techniques to improve and ideas to try.
• Earn merits towards a Masters Degree. If your entry scores above a certain level, you will earn a merit, which adds up to a PPA degree. And those degrees recognize a level of commitment to and skill in photography.
• Go “Loan.” Your image could score high enough to secure a spot in the International Traveling Loan Collection, which travels to different exhibits and is published in a book.

2010 3rd Place Award with Tom Hicks

Categories to enter in are: commercial, portrait, illustrative, and wedding prints, digital files, and albums.  Our entries presently must fit in a 16×20 space in whatever dimension we opt for inside of those parameters.  I’ve included my four entries exactly how I entered them below.

Last year, my first year, was a very, very good year. Because of the quality of my entries not only was I named Detroit’s Professional Photographer of the Year, but I received merit on three of my prints at the international level and won a coveted ‘loan’ award on one of my entries as well.  I have stared at those Loan Collection books for a long time dreaming of the day I might be good enough to be in one of them.  It was the bar I set for myself and continue to strive for every time I make a photograph.

A year has gone by.  Brad Hawks, of Fenton, is the new DPPA Photographer of the Year.  He’s an amazing artist.  I said good-bye to that big trophy and asked fellow photographer, Janet Schneider, to take a photo of me with it one last time.  I earned third place this year in Detroit.  Even better, out of the four prints I entered at PPA’s internationals, the results last week indicated I merited three out of my four images AGAIN!  No loan print this year.  But everyone tells me that I’ve set the bar pretty high for myself and I need to come back down to earth. 

A huge thank you to my good friends and mentors Dawn Havrelock and Anne Keesor, who are sensational photographers and also merited. They were my critique buddies through the whole process.  In a time when ‘everyone is a photographer’, there are still so many truly wonderful professionals out there who continue to hone their craft, challenge themselves to to go one step further to being the best they can be, and share their talent and knowledge with others.  I am proud to be in the profession I am in.  I wouldn’t trade it for the world.