The DecisiveDesign Blog

I wasn’t 100% sure what to think when I received an e-mail from Xoe saying that she liked my work and wanted me to photograph her while she was seven months pregnant. Luckily we were having some fantastic weather that week and Halford Park, the same place I photographed Melissa, hosted us perfectly.

I enjoyed the shoot, Xoe was great, and it wasn’t weird at all. I actually had fun capturing the natural beauty of the pregnant form and think we got some really great shots.

Check them out and let me know what you think.

 

It’s been tough to organize shoots as of late, with school, work, and some freelance stuff breathing down my neck, but I did manage to get out and accomplish one of the shoots i’ve been wanting to do since I stumbled across the location a few months ago.  If you recall, I found this beautiful old car pretty deep in a local park. It struck me, and from that moment I wanted to do do a shoot with a classy model in that unconventional environment.

I was fortunate enough to work with a great model. Melissa was communicative, punctual, fun to be around, and of course beautiful. We also brought out a new friend of mine, and makeup artist, Alison, to add a little extra beautification, which turned out fantastic. Alison’s husband, John, helped me out with the reflector since Mr. Hawes couldn’t make it out, so it was practically a full on production!

As you’ll see in the gallery below, the place has grown up quite a bit, so we actually had a hard time finding it again.  That was fine by me, however, because we didn’t have to worry about anyone bothering us! It was a very fun shoot; hopefully we can get together with everyone in the future and do something else – something even crazier!

 

• Yeah – you’re going to need that reflector… the big one… and pray for sunlight through those trees.
• Also… if you haven’t visited the location in a month or so… its probably grown up a bit, especially if the seasons have changed!
• You know better than this, but add at least 3 different outfits if shooting in similar locations to diversify the shoot – otherwise you’ve got a lot of images with the same clothing and you don’t really want to use more than a couple in a portfolio or profile, unfortunately

Finding myself in need of new material, I decided to venture out this past Sunday in search of worthwhile photography subjects.  Overall, it was a rather unproductive six hours of driving around to random locations near Lake Ray Hubbard and attempting to capture decent images.  Unfortunately, Texas doesn’t contain the most beautiful natural scenery during this time of the year, so my random exploration yielded little of what I was looking for.

There was one exception, however.  While wandering through a park near my house, I believe it is Holford Park, at 1790 Holford Road, Garland, TX, I noticed an odd shape about 100 yards off the trail and decided to explore.  I would consider what I came across an absolute gem.  

Check out some of the images below. I utilized Auto Exposure Bracketing and plan on combining the images to play with the  High Dynamic Range technique which will allow more detail in shadowy areas and places with bright highlights.  Expect a write up of my experiences with this technique once I get a chance to work on it.

 

• Finding good, natural material isn’t easy… expect to spend a lot of time finding a few decent subjects
• Don’t be afraid to venture from the traveled path, that’s where you’ll find what’s worth photographing
• Played with Auto Exposure Bracketing for HDR imaging, more on this later.