I plan on coming up with a local ad campaign. Because I’d rather make my way through school taking pictures of people than working at Starbucks. Perhaps I’ll use little postcard mailers. Hand-made flyers for my town’s small businesses and grocers. Word of mouth clearly isn’t cutting it lately. And hopefully, with the addition of my portfolio building work with Natalie, and my upcoming work with Dan and Amber and hopefully with Lisa, I’ll have more portraits to show off my style with.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this or where it will take me, but I know it’s worth a shot. I’m hoping to be lucky enough to be admitted into 9rules to give my name a little extra boost in SEO numbers, to be honest. It’s time to get creative, because in the end, that’s what photography is all about, even down to the marketing.

And I’m determined to figure something out. Because part-time, coffee hell is not for me, even if the coffee giant offers a good set of benefits to part-time employees.

On Saturday I took my friend Natalie out to Gasworks Park in Seattle for a little photo shoot. We had to spend a little bit of time getting her to loosen up in front of the camera, but once we did, she had a lot of fun and offered up a lot of great opportunities for shots. With her hair, her clothes and her general disposition, she had already lent a wonderful vintage feel to the photographs which I enhanced with a little bit of processing. Here are some of my favorites:

Next week is a photo shoot of my fiance, and the week after a sweet little shoot of a couple I know. I’m trying to build my portfolio up some more and hopefully get some clients lined up soon.

More of the set is here.

Despite his difficulty and seeming desire to annoy the snot out of his mother who was watching and chiming in quite frequently, I think I still got a few good shots out of the ordeal. Not all of them are very typical “senior portrait” material, but I don’t think that’s such a bad thing, either. Some of the ones I got were between Ambercrombie and over-done and portray him goofing off and just being himself. Others (more rare) were moments when I got a genuine smile or some other real feeling.

All in all, I enjoyed the process and look forward to my next opportunity to do it again. If I could survive a two hour photo shoot with Dusty, I think I can survive it with anyone. :)

See my favorites on my portfolio.

After a week of camp and using my camera extensively and often, I have finally been formally bitten by the photography bug. I adore taking pictures of people. For a while in high school, I was smitten by landscape and nature, and while I still try to take pictures of that, I feel there is so much more to capture and so much more challenge in portraiture photography. You have to try to catch the best and most interesting moments that show a relationship, you have to get close, but not so close that they clam up and it’s just another smiling face. There’s emotion. There’s a story. There’s all the complexity of the human tapestry that you are challenged to capture in an instant.

But, what really ensnared me was printing out a selection of photographs I had taken of Caleb at camp for Mitzi’s (his mother) birthday. There’s something special about seeing your work in print — being able to touch it and look at it close up without the interception of the monitor or LCD. And better still was seeing Wes and Mitzi hold the prints and smile.

I would love to take portraits. Senior. Families. Baby. Couples. Getting a foot in the door though, seems to be the difficult part. But then again, perhaps the key is starting small. If I offer to be around to take pictures for the Wes, Mitzi and Caleb and their friends (Allison, Justin and Wyatt) on occasion and for a reasonable price, I can improve my skill and capitalize on word of mouth.

Better to start small and steady, anyway, than to start big and with tons of momentum that ends up going nowhere but frustration.

I want my love affair with cameras, people and prints to last a life time…so some patience isn’t so bad after all. That said, if you’re in the Seattle area and want some portraits done, we can negotiate a price and a time if you shoot me an email! And, if you’re at all interested, I have some of my favorite photographs available for sale at Red Bubble.

The fun story about Caleb is all the kids who asked me if I was related to him…

The answer? Not yet.

A smaller selection of these pictures have been added to the art page. And, you can find even more pictures (most taken by me, some by Rich Knowlton, here. Those are unedited and unrotated pictures that were given to all the campers.