grassroots-photography.com

Well, I had high hopes for keeping up with this blog regularly, but then life happened! Between finding out we were expecting our second baby and a few months of morning sickness and buying/moving into our first home, as well as keeping up with an energetic four year old, all while continuing to photograph my awesome clients and their kiddos, this fell by the wayside. But I’m hoping to turn things around a bit now that things have calmed down and I’m in the off season, as far as photography goes.

I have a long list of sessions to share on here, so I’ll start with a family that I’ll be seeing again this weekend! Their boys were so adorable, and they ended up with dozens of great shots. I thought their mom’s idea to incorporate the oldest son’s Superman cape was awesome and captured his fun personality perfectly. He got such a kick out of it, and it made for some great shots at Liberty Memorial:

This mama originally contacted me to photograph the birth of her son, but it wasn’t anything like the other births I had photographed. She wanted the pictures to be a gift for her husband who was away at bootcamp and would miss the birth by only a week. I was so honored and also humbled by the idea. It’s one thing to SAY that you appreciate the work that servicemen and women do, but it’s another to be pushed smack-dab in the middle of one of their huge sacrifices. I couldn’t imagine giving birth to my husband’s child without him there. I couldn’t imagine being away at bootcamp and knowing that my wife was giving birth without me. So this birth was extra special for me, because it made me see more clearly the sacrifices that thousands and thousands of young families in our country are making every day.

The pictures below, though, are from a couple weeks later, once her husband had returned. She wanted some family shots, as well as the little boy’s newborn shots. He was a dream to photograph–he didn’t even cry once! And the older sister (who was only a little over a year old herself), was a complete princess that day, too:

Thanks, R Family, for asking me to photograph your adorable little family!

I’m really excited to offer a new service–photo editing! Since I began teaching myself digital photography about four years ago, the editing has by far been the most time consuming, nerve wracking, and rewarding aspect. Photoshop is an overwhelming piece of software, and I couldn’t begin to count the number of hours I have spent studying it (and cursing it, I admit!). But over the past year I’ve grown really comfortable with it and have figured out ways to “save” pictures that seem ruined, so I thought I’d offer my editing services to clients and photographers who have a picture they love but don’t want to frame because it’s either underexposed or dull or messed up in some other way. Here’s a good example of just that type of picture. I took my daughter to Deanna Rose Children’s Farm in Overland Park a few weeks ago, and after making it halfway through the park, she just HAD to have an ice cream cone. I took my fancy camera that day, because with all of the client sessions I’d been working on, I hadn’t managed to get many snapshots of our daily life for awhile. So we sat down for a snack, and I started snapping away. But I had the settings wrong for my first shot, and this was the result:

Yikes! I loved the goofy shot of my little girl, but it definitely wasn’t frame worthy. After some tweaking in Photoshop, though, I came up with two much better options:

Much better!

Now say you have a cute picture of your kiddo, but he/she has something distracting on his/her face and clothes (dirt, mud, or in this case, sand) that you wish you could get rid of. Here’s an example of how I can remove distracting things from a picture and bump up the color and definition:

Or say you have a picture that looks dull, and you’d like it to pop a little more so that it shows off your family member’s features better (in this case, my daughter’s usually big, brown eyes looked dull and lifeless):

If you’ve looked at many of my pictures, you’ve probably noticed that I don’t do real intense editing, like changing someone’s eye color or editing them so much that they look like alien eyes.  The latter seems to be a current trend in senior photography, and it’s not one I’m going to join for aesthetic reasons! But I do know how to pull out the color and definition that’s naturally there, without changing the person’s appearance or making them look like an overly-photoshopped cover model.

So here are the basics:

Editing services are $10 per image or $15 for 2 images (contact me for rates on larger amounts) and will include some or all of the following tweaks:

• color
• exposure
• white balance
• sharpening
• cropping
• removal of distracting facial blemishes or background elements
• edge burning
• black and white conversion (this will always be included)

Please note:

• You’ll need to submit the largest, unedited file size available for your image. RAW would be ideal (if you are using an SLR), but I can work with large JPGs.
• For obvious business reasons, I can’t disclose the steps I took to edit your images.
• If for some reason the image you submit is beyond my skill level of editing, I’ll let you know asap and refund your money.
• These services are available to anyone, including other photographers.
• I’ll have your newly edited image to you within one week (time frames may be longer for multiple images).

To submit an image, email it to me as an attachment at abby@grassroots-photography.com and I’ll send you info about the payment options.

When I got my first look at this little girl…

I immediately thought of this little one…

What beautiful lips! I know a lot of women would pay good money for full lips like that, and here she is sporting them au naturel at a week old. No fair!

This little girl’s parents are some of the best humored, most laid back people I have worked with. Before we even met the first time at their maternity shoot, her mom had me laughing with funny texts about her supposedly “not-so-cute” pregnant belly and a case of mistaken identity (she had been staring down a photog at the park that was definitely NOT me!). We even started discussing personal and not-so-fun-or-attractive pregnancy symptoms. That’s a definite ice-breaker! But I’m always relieved to come across families like this, because photography is really a personal thing that can easily get very uncomfortable when people take themselves too seriously. Most people, especially women (and including myself!), hate having their picture taken, so a portion of my job is finding ways to make them relax. It was nice not having to work so hard at that during my sessions with them!

Thanks, K & J, for asking me to photograph you guys and your beautiful little girl. I can’t wait to see her at her 6 month session!