What I loved about this wedding was its simplicity. It was all about family and an intimate ceremony. There were not tons of details to be photographed…just people and the emotions of the evening. Paige and Bill were a lot of fun and it was truly an honor to be able to photograph their wedding. Other than the photos of the couple, I have to say my favorite photos are of the wedding crasher, a squirrel who helped himself to a cracker off the table.
My family has belonged to Fry’s Spring Beach Club for several years and it is one of our favorite places to be come summertime. It has an amazingly relaxed atmosphere, a great staff and is very charming in a vintage pool club kind of way. This summer, as a way to raise a little extra revenue for the club I’m offering a Jump for FSBC portrait event. I just finished up the June sessions and will be looking forward to photographing more, excited jump enthusiasts in July (17th and 18th). Here are a few of my favorites from the June sessions!
For the last two years I’ve taken a portrait of my daughter Willa around the time of her birthday. Usually I take her to the gardens at UVA, but this year I wanted to do something a little different. My wife and I wanted to truly capture the essence of Willa. What do we want to remember about her as an almost 3 year old and what makes her tick. The answer was easy. She loves books and she always has. She could sit all day and be read to or sit quietly by herself and look through books (or stories as she calls them). Everyone who knows Willa knows she is book obsessed.
So we decided to set her in a chair with some books in Mrs. Heyward’s beautiful garden at Foxhaven Farm. We borrowed the chair from a friend, but the dress was my wife’s from the 70’s, as was the book, Petunia, one of Willa’s favorites.
Of course, Willa had other plans for getting her portrait taken and wanted very much to be Tinkerbell. After many treats and promises of a wardrobe change, Willa pranced around the garden like a real fairy, checking out the last of the peony blooms and finding little garden nooks that fascinate children.
Yesterday my wife was determined to go strawberry picking. It’s not that I didn’t want to go, I just had a million things to do and my oldest daughter desperately wanted to go to the pool for her first dunk of the season. So we decided to divide and conquer. I put Willa down for her nap, Lauren took Eden to the pool and I got a few hours of work done before we headed out to pick strawberries.
We drove out to Crozet to Chiles Peach Orchard. Why we’ve never been before, I am not sure. I think my wife wondered if perhaps it was the end of the world and she had indeed gone to Heaven. We are opposites in many ways, one being she is pure country mouse to my city mouse. But I had to agree, it was an amazing setting with the mountains as a backdrop to the fields of strawberries. At one point we even heard a train approaching and the girls got to watch it pass by. It was right out of a movie.
The girls were completely enchanted. Eden, our oldest, was amazed that the insides of the strawberries were actually red, and not white like the store bought berries. “Look, look” she’d yell, “it’s red”! Exactly the way it is supposed to be. Willa had a hard time grasping the concept of putting the berries in the basket and instead popped them in her mouth. The girls (my wife included) didn’t want to leave, but we finally lured them away from the fields with promises of donuts back at the barn. Those were some very happy, juicy smiles.
The berries have been washed, hulled and frozen. Next up…homemade strawberry ice cream.
