A Windy Day

Hello. Please forgive the tardiness of this new entry. All star soccer has gobbled up our last few weekends, leaving only a crumb or two of time. Laundry is sitting in clumps around the house, expired eggs are sitting in the fridge, and loads of sweet pictures are sitting on my computer. Thankfully, the rain dance that Hannah and I did yesterday evening produced a decent amount of precipitation over night, thus canceling this weekend's soccer tournament! Woohoo! We love soccer, but we need to reacquaint ourselves with our life before the cameras from "Hoarding, Buried Alive" show up on our doorstep!

All right, prepare to feast your eyes on this new set of pictures. I met the Tappeiner family over a month ago at the Santa Barbara Mission. The day was clear, but wind advisories had us a bit worried. Thankfully, we found protected places to pose and just as we were finishing up the session, the wind arrived with bells and whistles.

This family was so, so fun to work with! Yes, they ended up with many sweet images, but however sweet they seem in pictures doesn't even come close to how warmhearted they are in person! Ranging in age from 18 to 3, these siblings had the best time together, laughing, playing, and just being a great team! Their graciousness made my time with them a delight, and I can't wait to get them in front of my lens sometime in the future!

The Watson Family

Lucky you. You get to feast your eyes on yet another adorable family! This family is making their third appearance on the blog - so you might recognize them! : ) It is such fun to photograph families each year. I get to spend some time with people I really like and I get to document their growth and maturity over the years. What is amazing, though, is that this "maturity" is only evident in children, with adults I have a magic setting on my camera that makes them ageless.

At any rate, the Watson family and I traipsed past the butterfly preserve, across the bluffs, and even ventured down to the Pacific. We are so lucky to have such beauty virtually in our backyards! April and I were reminiscing as we walked through the woods near the Monarch preserve about the rope swing that used to stretch across the very gully where today thousands of butterflies and visitors spend time with one another in quiet reflection. I guess a lot has changed since I sat on my front lawn with the neighborhood kids, bagged packed, waiting for the world to spontaneously end in the year 1984 (wow - I must be feeling brave to date myself so much!!).

Luckily, while time marches on, and rope swings make way for naturalists and butterflies, friendship is timeless, and I'm so glad to have my buddy from my 4/5 grade classroom still around to photograph and reminisce with!

Enjoy!

I mean seriously, can you even believe how beautiful these children are???

Good boy, Ziggy.

At the Lake

Something I love about my photo sessions is that each one is unique and unpredictable. How will siblings get along? My own children become incredibly ill behaved the minute my camera is pointed toward them. Will two year olds run away from me screaming? Will we hear thunder and wonder why we're not heading inside? Will it be so foggy we can't see ten feet in front of us? Will a group of coyotes wander by? Will my flash diffuser roll off my camera, across a footbridge, and land in a lake below? Will I almost get hit by a train? All these things have happened to me during photo sessions, so you can see how I just don't bother trying to predict how things will go.

About a month ago I was happy to be meeting a family I have photographed before. I was looking forward to their session because we had such a fun time the last time we met up at Goleta Beach a year or two ago. But, like I said earlier, I keep an open mind and don't form expectations before a session. It turns out, we had just as much fun this time around. : ) First of all, you will see for yourself how adorable this family is. The girls, while different from each other in personality, each were a dream to photograph. They had no shortage of ideas for places to pose in (trees, mostly), and were relaxed and mostly inhibited while in front of the camera. Their fantastic dad, Ian, carried my gear all over Lake Los Carneros, and Adrienne, their mom, helped keep everyone focused and organized. It was a special treat to have their aunt along with us as well to keep the mood light hearted and fun!

Thanks again for choosing me again to capture your sweet family!

My Brother's Family

You may not know I come from a family of five children. Since I have three kids of my own and am going a bit crazier each day, I really can't fathom how my mom managed it all. I obviously need her secret! Like I said, there are five of us and I fall directly in the middle. I have two younger sisters and an older sister and brother. If you were reading closely, you just realized that makes four girls and one boy. My poor brother - second to the oldest and surrounded by sisters! Although he grew up wishing for a brother, I think Mike now realizes he was being prepared for his future life as a dad himself! Mike and his wife, Lisa, have three children just like me, and they are all girls! : )

I have had my photography business for about four years now, but a camera has been around my neck for much longer than that. In fact, Mike's three girls, my nieces, were my first subjects. I lived with Mike and Lisa for the last year or two of college. During this time, they had their first child, Michelle, who is now in the middle of her junior year at UC Santa Cruz!!! At any rate, living with my baby niece gave me lots of opportunties to pull out my camera. As she grew and her new sister, Jessica, joined the ranks, I continued to experiment more with photography. By the time my own first child arrived on the scene, I was officially hooked to capturing life with my camera!

As you can see, my nieces are quite big now!!! Two are in college and one is in junior high! I was thrilled to photograph my brother's family while everyone was home for Thanksgiving. We went out to their second home, the Ellwood bluffs, for our photo session. Mike and his family live just steps away from the bluffs in a house across the street from where we grew up ourselves. Mike and Lisa walk/run their dogs on the bluffs every day so it seemed fitting to use this location as our backdrop.

I hope you enjoy their photos as much as I enjoyed taking them!

I had these candy canes in my photography bag for about a month before I actually remembered that I wanted to play around with them in a few pictures. So happy I finally dragged them out!