I'm glad the neon graveyard is being stupid!

As most of the photographic world knows, the WPPI convention and trade show took place in Vegas about a month ago. This convention is ridiculously big. I think there were 14,500 photographers there in 2010. Yes that's a freakin' lot of photographers. and walking through the crowded trade show we saw everyone from the ultra pretentious wannabe photo rock stars to the cult of personality photographers with their throngs of on hangers, to the average Joe artist/photographer, to the old photo vets seeing what all the new kids are up to. It really is an eclectic mix of people.
Anyway, while we are there, we like to shoot stuff. Normally we do a little walking or driving around photographing things, sort of street photos, nature, etc. This trip we had a great opportunity to photograph a family we have known for a while.
The Slightings got in touch with us last year about photographing the family while we were there. When we talked about where we wanted to shoot we were really wanting to photograph at the Neon Museum. Unfortunately, there was a photographer that photographed there a couple of years ago; and won some awards with the prints. Since then it has been a place that photographers wanted to visit to recreate those images, (and there have been a lot of super crappy remakes). So, the museum; realized that they had a photographic gold mine. They remodeled to make it more accessable for photographers and then tacked on a $200.00 per hour price tag! What? yup? talking about really taking advantage of people. The fee for that almost doubles most photographers session fees.... urgh!
So, I was fairly upset with this and I just don't feel like that is an ethical amount to charge for that......
We talked about other places to go and Brad Slighting had been to a ghost town about an hour outside of town. So we checked it out, on Google Earth of course. (if you don't know me, I dig Google Earth, it has helped me find many locations to shoot)
Anyway, the placed looked super cool! we got out there and asked about photo fees and rules. Well after the lessons on rattlesnakes and 10 ways to die in the desert, and a $10.00 per hour photo fee (that's more like it) we were out taking pictures.
Old trucks, buses, crashed planes, abandoned mines, buildings, gas pumps, things I've never seen before, were all over the place. It was awesome and I can't wait to go back!
The Slightings are the cutest family. Two boys, two girls, suuuuuuuper cute kids! and we only had 1 breakdown!!
We walked around for about an hour and a half taking pix having fun and trying to beat the wind and rain that were wanting to end our session.
Anyway, enjoy the images and if you want to do a session there let us know we will be there next spring!

soggy

The way our luck and the weather work is the following: If there is a chance for rain and we don't reschedule our shoot, we usually get rained on, If we do reschedule the weather turns out beautiful. This is not always a problem in NM because we so often have great weather. In the spring and end of summer, however, we do get wind and monsoons, respectively. So we often shoot in the mornings to avoid the chance of weather. So when we shot Stephanie and her family we shot first thing in the morning, and becasue we were trying to avoid weather...yup! it rained, but only a bit. The grass however was super soggy which kept us off the grass for most of the shoot!
Anyway, here is what we did photograph!

One of our favorites!

Melissa is one of our good friends and long time clients (one of our favs). I think we should all have a family photographer. One who knows who we are and can photograph us through out our changing lives.
We have been able to see Melissa's life change over the years. We photographed her marriage to Colin, an intimate session for their anniversary, and then a maternity session (funny how that happens soon after an intimate session). then sessions for their family as they have grown. We recently did a session for them up in the sandias. We had a little picnic and shot a few pictures, we got to talk and hang out and just have a nice couple of hours away.




So this is one of the first images in the series I am doing called the illustrated family. The Illustrated family takes a family and expresses who they are. in a non traditional portrait type of way! I dig it!

Motley Family

A few weeks ago we had another opportunity to work with some great people and good friends. The Motley family met us out at the petroglyph park and we took the evening to photograph their family before Terrance left on a church mission. He will be gone for two years in Italy teaching about the birth, teachings, atonement, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ. It's an amazing thing to see a 19 year old young man have such a dedication and love for the gospel that he will dedicate two years of his life to it. We wish him all the best and hope that his family doesn't miss him too much!
We look forward to when Terrance comes home so we can do another session with the entire family.

Legacy

The wrinkles in Flora's hands were more evident against the young skin of baby Olivia. Though they are separated by 97 years, they are connected through the blood that runs through their veins. Four generations of women, four lives, though each different, are tied together as family.
We had an amazing honor of photographing a four generation family as part of our Legacy session.

We are re-introducing our Legacy Limited Edition Session this month. This is an amazing opportunity for us to capture the relationship we share with one another before it becomes too late.
Desiree will be sharing, in an upcoming post and email, her story of why we are so passionate about these sessions. Her story comes from her regret in not taking the time to bring her grandmother into the studio to get pictures with our grandsons before it was too late.
The Medina family took advantage of the time they still had and we were able to capture their relationship and preserve that for their family forever!

a few holiday sessions

Unfortunately we don't have the time to blog every session. especially over the holidays. We did however do a number of sessions over the holidays and I thought I would at least put a few into a blog... I chose a few that kind of spanned life.

Isaac and Nicole came in for their maternity session. It was just suppose to be a half hour or so session but we spent a little more time with her and tried out some new background that we've been wanting to use!




Akash came to meet his parent this year and we had the opportunity to photograph mommy's maternity pictures and his newborns! I love his fab hair, and have decided he's a pretty good mix of both mom and dad!






We photographed David and Anita's wedding in 2006 they added to the family this year and called us to photograph the changes. Elijah was so serious the entire shoot, it made us laugh because I know we looked like idiots trying to make him laugh, and he was not having it!! Hey we tried and I love the way they turned out.










We have known the hicks family for a number of years. We have watched their kids grow, Desiree and I have even taught a few of their kids Sunday school. Desiree Just got involved in Cub Scouts and will have the opportunity to work with the kids again. This is actually one of my favorite images from 2008. We were just doing light checks and Desiree captured this Norman Rockwell-esque image.


Garilyn & Johnny met us for a location session in the bosque. Garilyn had told me they wanted to do something different, they had done the studio potrait thing and now they wanted to have some fun! Even Zero the gi-normous golden lab got to play. Thanks for letting us play!













Again, we wish we could blog about all the other folks we had the opportunity to work with. There just aren't enough hours in the day...