It’s that time of year again. Cory and I took Anakin out to Vandaveer park to take his school pictures. I know the school does them every year, and the ones the school takes are fine for the yearbook or whatever, but they don’t really capture personality that well, so I’ve been taking the kids out for my own version of school pictures each fall. I probably posted way more than I should have, but I’m a mom and I’m biased this time. Crystal was at Grandma’s this weekend when we did Anakin’s, so stay tuned for her pictures in a few weeks. 🙂

I love this one, I think he was trying to eat the flowers, but still cute.

He’s totally in love with that huge fountain, he’d be swimming if we let him.

I really love his “far off visionary” look. Anakin always seems like he knows some deep meaningful secret.

You probably can’t tell it, but she climbed into the plants just so I could get the lovely cherry frame going. Awesomeness!

Gorgeous smile!

I was really lucky last weekend, I got to meet up with a photographer friend of mine, Joe, and Lindsey again, she’s a friend of mine from college and she’s done some modeling for me and a local photography group before. She’s a great artist and model. Plus she crawled around a giant press and got covered in ink, just so we could get some good photos. We had a blast, and I got some really great photos, and Joe taught me a bit about using gelled (colored) flashes to get a different look.

Despite that comment about gelled flashes, the lovely background light here is all ambient, I love finding cool lighting like this. The cool flash used for fill was a nice contrast.

This was some of that cool lighting I mentioned.

View a slideshow of the rest of the shoot below

My little sister Faith and her friend Rachael are both seniors this year. I was pretty excited to get to shoot their senior portraits. We’ve gotten to know Rachael pretty well over the last year, she’s gone on camping trips with the family and they both come over to swim all summer. My daughter really looks up to both of them. She has a little plastic cell phone that she runs around with “texting people like Faith & Rachael do.” Since that’s all these girls do we had to take some pictures with their cell phones. Unfortunately my new favorite spot for portraits was loaded with bugs this time, not sure if it’s the time of year or because we arrived later in the evening, but it was pretty awful. They still managed to look gorgeous, thanks for being such good sports about it. Anyways, we had a lot of fun and I think we got some really great photos.

My favorite picture of Faith.

One of my favorite shots of Rachael, Cory took this one and I think it looks really natural.

Another great shot from Cory.

This one is probably my favorite from the whole shoot, I love how pretty Rachael looks in that dress and the lovely sunset lighting.

Sunday I had the pleasure of photographing Nikki, a beautiful mom and teacher. I think I was a bit nervous, it was my first maternity session, but I couldn’t have asked for a better family to work with. 🙂 Tim and Anna you two were such good sports. Now I just have to wait for adorable newborn pictures!