Summer Portraits

With summer approaching, the colors and light outside have become more vivid and bright. That's great for my Nikon camera, which captures colors so well as long as I white balance before each shoot. But the brightness is sometimes hard to get around. To avoid squinting eyes and harsh shadows, I look for shady spots to take photos. These photos were taken at the model's home in her front and back yard. The trees and the house provided enough cover from the sun, and the ivy, lattice fence, and brick made lovely backgrounds.

This time, I concentrated on getting portrait shots of each model. The girls were pretty easy to capture. At first, the oldest played and posed readily for me. Even when she got a little stubborn about having her picture taken, she looked great on camera (see the close-up black and white photo). The baby was an easy-going calm one. She was just about happy with anything I did to get a good picture. Lastly, I wanted to give mom a nice portrait of herself. When the light hit her brown eyes just right, I took several shots of her alone. It's great to have pictures of you and your children, but sometimes it's nice when you are the star of the photo alone.

This is the second-to-last photo shoot from my Early Motherhood Project. I have one more mom and baby pair to shoot, and then I am officially done with this project . . . at least the photography part. I would like to have some of my work from this project published and am looking into that possibility.