Family Photography | Maternity, baby and family photography

Posts Tagged ‘family photography’

Mi vida es arte – My life is art

I love Mexico

I’m leaving Mexico City a different person and I didn’t expect that. I spent a week here with my boyfriend rushing around to different exhibits, seeing architecture and eating amazing food. The usual tourist stuff. So what was different?

Diego Rivera mural

What left a lasting impression was the homage to and display of the integration of art and life. Architecture was combined with video, combined with furniture, combined with photography, combined with print making. In essence, the artist or artists had rich displays of work not just their one medium, but it became clear that their life and everything that they did became a part of the exhibit. A simple example was Frida Kahlo’s house.

Ticket stub from Frida Kahlo’s house.

It wasn’t just about her paintings but all of the story of her life that influenced those paintings as well as the environment she painted in and the objects that she surrounded herself with, her clothes, her jewelry, her animals. The exhibit was multidimensional and acknowledged all of her. And many other exhibits we went to did the same, the Barragan House, an exhibit at the Tamayo Museum. It wasn’t just about what the artist produced but about where, how their life influenced their work, and the other creative arts that influenced them as well.

The Luis Barragan House. An amazing example of Mexican architecture.

This opened my eyes to seeing the disparate threads of my work and my life coming together. i started to imagine integrating them in a way I hadn’t thought of before. The scale of my work changed from merely 2-D photography, to incorporating the audio I collected so long ago from pregnant women, to video, to the 3-D work and to other work that I have had stored in my mind but not realized.

I am returning refreshed and energized to realize a bigger picture of what I am doing.

Mi vida es arte.

PS I met up with some old friends and photographed them with their kids in the beautiful post office.

A cutie who I just met in Mexico City. The son of old friends from graduate school.

MORE PHOTOS FROM THE TRIP.

Brian photographing the hanging stacks at the Vasconcelos Library in Mexico City

The wall of a house in San Angel.

Late night taco stand. Best Al Pastor in Mexico City.

What can Leonardo DaVinci tell us about making better family photos

Look at the triangles and the diagonals that are created.

I recently did a proof edit over the phone with one of my favorite clients. I have been working with her long enough that we have similar discussions about images we like and images we think work together. She is so great, she comes up with brilliant ideas for triptych (three images together) that sometimes I haven’t even seen. I love that!

Check out all the triangles in this image! And my client after working with me for several years has now developed her seeing and put them three together which I think is brilliant.

I am writing this today because I think these images illustrate what I feel to be an important aspect any good portrait or fine art photograph – the triangle or the diagonal. While we aren’t getting as specific as DaVinci’s Golden Ratio, that appear prominently in his work, a lot can be learned by studying this master.

The brilliance of DaVinci

As I photograph my clients and their children, I am not thinking about this. It is only after the session that I see what I have done. It is interesting to me that I was unaware I did it until a friend who is a painter was over at my studio and he pointed it out. After that it was all I saw and it made a good photo better.

More triangles. Do you see them?

Start looking at photography with this in mind and see if you notice something different about the images, whether or not you like them or you don’t. Good photography is more than just capturing a good smile, it is about creating something that has feeling and good composition. Good luck and have fun!

The crop brings out the triangles here.

Look at how the window panes cross right at her head. Look at the gentle way the little girl is touching her mother. I love this image.

San Francisco Baby Photography – Jackson!

Wow. Ever had a shoot where the baby is just one big lovely ball of energy? I had that happen with Jackson in our baby photography session in SF!

When I teach classes I tell my students to connect energetically with their clients. This to me is a very important component of photography – connection, or shooting from the heart instead of the head, as my mentor Bryan Moss would say. It isn’t easy. If you are a new photographer and are trying to figure out F-stops and shutter speeds, the last thing you have time to do is to think about shooting from the heart. What if the exposure is wrong?! But once you get all the technical stuff behind you, then try it, and see what happe

Baby Jackson had a blast at our recent photo session! And so did I.