Ella is a high school senior and I had the privilege of photographing her senior portraits on an extremely warm (!) fall evening. She handled the extreme heat and the garden variety bugs like a champ. The light and the wildflowers cooperated quite nicely and we had a great time! Ella is sweet, passionate, fun, and loves cats and dogs (my kind of person). Her mother claims that she’s existed entirely on carbs up to this point (which I can definitely relate to), and we also have tuxedo cats and an older sister in common. She also loves pizza, but she’s a pineapple-on-pizza type of girl so I have to draw our pizza comparisons to an end there. She’s skilled at sports and played softball for most of her education, but now she’s looking forward to a profession in nursing in order to help people. I can’t wait to see what Ella does in the future! I grabbed a few shots of her sister Claire and mom Susan toward the end – such a fun bunch who came along to support Ella and give her reminders of mac and cheese as she posed.

Karen+Co.

Senior portraits are something we don’t get the chance to do that often, but they are FUN. Especially when you get impressive seniors and they can teach you things like how you should engage your core while climbing on dangerous playground equipment in order to take their photographs, and how you should also probably stabilize your feet better. Karen came all the way to Sante Fe to have her senior pictures taken with us! Well, not really, but kind of? She came with her sister Anna to visit their Uncle Glenn and Aunt Kathy. And Aunt Kathy happens to be Kathy White Swope, who works with the always amazing Sally Oakley to form an unstoppable team of wedding planners here whom we love very much. So Aunt Kathy recommended us to do Karen’s senior portraits and Karen was on board and the dream was born. And by “dream” I mean a plan was hatched to have a place where Karen could hang upside down while I took her pictures.

Karen is in the circus (!!!) and also does fencing (!!!) and is generally impressive and fabulous. She can climb and hang upside down and has a lot of upper arm strength and obviously a stable core accompanied by good foot placement. She also has a great sense of humor (as does Anna, Kathy, and Glenn) and we all had a bit of fun running around Pullen Park in Raleigh (and later in Mordecai, where Kathy and Glenn were married). We also took pictures of Awesome Younger Sister Anna, who had no qualms about sitting in tree caves or trying to get her older sister attacked by ducks (as a younger sister who has an older sister who is also nervous around fowl of all types, I did find this humorous). And we also took pictures of Uncle Glenn and Aunt Kathy because of COURSE since they set this up and accompanied us and helped immensely. It was a good time. Sparklers were lit but not by Kathy because she deserves just one day off from lighting sparklers and she actually got to use them for once instead of trying to give a bunch of wedding guests directions and trying not to get caught on fire. It was a grand ole time. We were so lucky to be able to work with this whole crew, and we wish the best of luck to our outstanding senior Karen – Class of 2018!

pittsburgh visit.

this past weekend and week has been a total whirlwind for us. we went home knowing we’d already be busy enough with my mom’s birthday and visiting my grandma in the hospital, but with added engagement news on top of that we got really exhausted really quick. lots of talking, lots of planning, lots of discussion. we didn’t get back to raleigh until late sunday night and have been rushing to catch up on all the business we missed while we were gone while simultataneously trying to recover. geoff has a cold and i’m exhausted, but we’re slowly catching up. i’ve been editing from last week’s shoots and preparing for the wedding i’m photographing this weekend in cary.

i uploaded some of the photos we took in pittsburgh this past week – all of which were taken at PNC park. we took my mom there for her birthday as neither of my parents had ever been to the new stadium. the pirates lost, of course, but going to that stadium is always so much fun – and it was fireworks night! plus the pittsburgh skyline never gets old.

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magic hour in the ‘burgh.

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the sister and me…cheesing it up at the game.

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seriously – who mows those lines so straight?

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there was a giant red moon that night that, when photographed properly, reminds me of a bad 80s music video.

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“even fireworks at pirates games dwarf most cities’ fourth of july.” – laura

p.s. go steelers!