Today’s session took us to an area that we haven’t been to in quite a while. For a season of time, we were in Olney quite a bit, but for the past few years, we’ve only been there a couple of times. It was pretty cool driving the roads on our way down. Because I had been that way so many times, I remembered all of the roads quite clearly. I remembered old houses and barns that were along those roads. It was pretty cool being back to an area I’ve not been for a while. For the bulk of Abbie and Michael’s session, I was in a new area, we shot at Red Hills State Park. This park had so much to offer for pictures, from the lake to the woods, we had so many locations to work with and for most of the session the sun light was on our side. I was a huge fan of how the lighting was working in the pictures. The cool thing with these types of sessions is that we spend time walking around looking for locations. While most of this location was full of trees and not much different that what we have here at home, sometimes driving 1.5 hours away helps me view the scenery with a fresh eye. As I’ve said a thousand times before, I never want to get in this rut of doing the same spot, same lighting, same pose, etc that you find with a lot of photographers. It’s not creative, nor is it fun. At that point, it’s doing what you can to make a buck. For me, it’s pretty much the opposite, I want it to be creative and I usually spend a buck (or two) to drive or even fly to where ever we are going. I’m my own boss, no way do I want to limit my creativity for a session, and this was one of the things Abbie (and her mom) stressed to me that they wanted creative pictures and they trusted us to do so. Of course working with these two definitely helped in coming up with some fun and creative poses.
Photographing people is just so much fun. No two couples are alike and they way the couples interact with each other is always different, so this definitely keeps me on my toes and coming up with new ways to work with couples. Abbie and Michael have such fun personalities, and it definitely shows in the pictures with all the laughter they shared during the session. After the state park, we made our way back to downtown Olney where we would finish pictures at the fire station. Michael works there, so we were able to gain access to one of the trucks and use it for the pcitures. I LOVE this!! Only one time before have I worked at a fire station for pictures, and it’s so much fun being able to use something like a fire truck as a prop in the pictures.
