one girl at a time

Just one day since I told you about the upcoming changes for 2012 and I’ve already got a very neat post for you.

Some of my regular readers will recognize this amazingly beautiful woman; she’s one of three sisters who belonged to Pelei, a perfectly lovely dog whom I was able to photograph twice before she died of cancer last year. Things have changed in Pelei’s old household: there’s a new rescue, Apollo; a giant, gangly sort of baby white Boxer who (apparently) has a crush on me. And in even bigger news (but while we’re on the subject), Kat is about to have a baby girl of her very own.

These Wells sisters: I just love them. I could eat them up. I don’t even remember how I came to meet Victoria, who then introduced me to Mary & Katharine (all Queen’s names, did you notice?) at P’s first photo shoot, but I do know that they’re the kind of people I just want to do things for. Any thing. Photography things, advice things, whatever things they need. I should just unofficially adopt them so that I have their darling beings at my disposal whenever I want to photograph something pretty…something that will make my heart happy.

I offered to photograph Kat and her growing bump because, as I’ve barely gotten finished telling you, this is the year of Portraits. I never did a lot of maternity shoots because I never really got into the mainstream baby belly thing. You already know I don’t like twee; so the hands forming a heart on the belly thing just didn’t do anything for me. I mean, I know that a lot of people like that, and that’s perfectly ok, right? Art is subjective, totally subjective, and people like what they like and it’s not always me.

But I’ll be honest here; when I approach a subject matter with which I don’t have a lot of experience, I look to my peers for inspiration. That left me frustrated, because although my favorite photographers created beautiful photos of bellies & bumps, I couldn’t see myself shooting those same pictures.

This is where the Changes came in. Yes, Changes with a capital C. When I came to realize that I could shoot people any way I wanted, everything else was cake. So with Kat, for example, I shot her as a woman who just happens to be pregnant. I focused not on what I’d seen others do, or things I’d seen in magazines, but things that were specifically about Kat. Things that I found beautiful about her AND about her pregnancy.

It sounds pretty simple when I say it out loud–I mean, duh…1 + 1 = 2, right? But it’s not that simple when you’re trying to create something unique every single time you walk in someone’s front door. It’s especially not that easy when you’re working with something that is so important and precious (oh, and Kat, in *this* context I really do mean precious). I mean, not only do you want to get it right, you want to blow this person’s mind.

So. These are just a few of the things that I found beautiful about Kat. I’ve got more coming, but I’m so excited about this 2012 “epiphany” (and of course it is SO me to get an epiphany just around the time the world is supposed to end), I wanted to show it off a bit.