Joy’s sister just knew that Jasper would be born on Superbowl Sunday.  She even cancelled plans to take a trip out of town for the weekend, wanting to stick around for the birth.  Joy wasn’t so convinced, baby Jasper wasn’t due for almost another week.  But sure enough something else started kicking off before kick off.  Sometimes a sister just knows.

Sweet Jasper was just two weeks old when we took these photos and has the cutest habit of sleeping with her tongue poking out.  I love the photos of her snuggled up on her white, snow-like nursery room rug.  Perfect for a winter baby.

Joy and Reggie are so great with her already, they are one of the few parents to tell me that life with a newborn isn’t nearly as hard as folks say it is, which gives us a lot of hope!

Here’s a slideshow from the session and if you would like to view the online gallery, click here.  I’m so excited to be documenting Jasper and family as she grows through her first year!

Posted by Mel @ 9:20 pm, in Newborns, Portraits, Wee Ones | No comments | Permalink

Always more books to share… The Queensberry matted album is a classic choice, even an unconventional wedding appears timeless in a matted book.

Amy and Mike’s elegant wedding at Virginia Crossings Resort is bound in black.  What’s true for cocktail dresses is also true for albums: you can’t go wrong with black.  In addition to a black leather cover, their pages are made of black mats, pagemounts and black edging.  Edging is a curb applied to the rim of each mat for protective and aesthetic purposes.  Edging gives the matted book both heft and a formal appearance, here’s what it looks like:

Because the coloring of Amy and Mike’s wedding warm for fall, we converted all the black and whites in their album to a warm tone as well… meaning the shadows were converted from a blue black to a brown black.  Warm tone black and white is a subtle effect, something more likely to be appreciated on a subconscious level.  Can you notice it in the photos below?

One perk about doing a matted album with Queensberry is that you can maintain a panorama across the layout spread, like so:

And of course, we love the translucent vellum opening pages in our Queensberry books:

Carrie and Ben added contrast to their book of photos from their fun, preppy-cool wedding.  Like Amy and Mike, they chose a black leather cover with black mats but added an ivory pagemount and edging, creating a white border around each matted photo as well as a white binding page.  Here’s what their combination looks like:

Stay tuned for more books soon…

Posted by Mel @ 9:22 pm, in Albums | 1 comment | Permalink

It was great to get to shoot these two cutie sisters again after our session last fall.  Baby Lauren is just over 5 months old now and has that adorable baby chub that she seems to enjoy modeling for me…you go, girl!

Anna showed me how she can put on her own shoes now, so big!  She loves to dance with Elmo.

She also did some finger painting while her sis napped.  A poster used to hang in our basement when my sister and I were growing up depicting an artist smurf with paint all over him and a caption reading, “Genius is Rarely Tidy.”  So true!

Here’s a slideshow of our session and if you would like to view the online gallery, click here.  I’m looking forward to our next session in the spring!

Posted by Mel @ 8:20 pm, in Portraits, Wee Ones | No comments | Permalink

In case you were thinking, um… did the Japan posts fall off the face of the earth?  Rest assured, I will finish up with those next week.  We’ve got a couple big destinations left to share, including Tokyo!  No collection of photos from Japan would be complete without Tokyo. 

As for the past few weeks, I have been up to my eyeballs in babies.  There have been two exciting and joyous births in our family to celebrate, lots of professional baby related shoots we have yet to share, a new puppy in our home and… drum roll…Sam and I are expecting a baby of our own!  So its been all baby, all the time around here and I promise to get back to world travel reminiscing next week.  It will be a little while before we can resume our international adventures so I am going to savor this trip for all its worth.

Stay tuned…

Posted by Mel @ 2:36 pm, in Personal | 4 Comments | Permalink