I got a last minute call last Friday night to PLEASE come cover a 21st birthday party. Apparently the original photographer got the days confused and didn’t show up. Luckily the party was going on close to my house. I begged Grandma to take Katie and texted Tommy I would be home LATE and was shooting the party within 1/2 an hour of the phone call. I have been very careful not to post any photos of identifiable people with drinks in hand. The party started out at Morgan’s for dinner with friends and family. Around 9:00 19 of us piled into a hummer limo and went to Power Plant in Baltimore. We started at Howl at the Moon piano bar and ended up at Mosiac…well actually the last stop was McDonalds. Everyone had a great time and it really didn’t get out of hand at all. A lot different from the last birthday party I shot.
It’s 3am and I have finally finished editing the images from the biggest birthday party ever (shot two weeks ago). Milan’s family is Indian and in their culture the first birthday is a very big deal. Milan celebrated in a beautiful restaurant in Bethesda, with a face painter, a dozen parrots, and a team of children’s activity directors who kept the kids busy with games and crafts. Beautiful children all dressed up, many in brightly colored traditional outfits. There was a great shot everywhere I turned. I brought Phil Riebe along as my second shooter to cover the parrots. The first 11 shots in the album are his. He did an excellent job. Thanks Phil.
If you are looking for the baby pictures you are not in the wrong place. Scroll down. They are still my first love. I just wanted to share these images with my customers as well.
I did a really cool shoot for musician Freddie Long Thursday night at 2:30am in the middle of Patrick Street. Lots of creativity, a collaboration of great ideas, and some pretty unconventional lighting techniques made for some awesome images.
Freddie, of the Freddie Long Band http://www.freddielong.com/splashpage/ needed a few individual shots for some solo work he is doing. I had been bouncing around the idea of shooting my mother’s new furniture line at night in the middle of the street in front of her store (AnneMarie’s Interior Details, 28 E. Patrick Street) when Freddie emailed me about doing some shots for him. I thought why not two birds with one stone? Of course the piping on the sofa wasn’t perfect and had to be sent back. But Freddie and I went with the idea anyway. I grabbed the darling little red love seat out of my family room, the end table from the studio that I put my newborns on, a lamp from storage, a couple extension cords and my sleepy boyfriend who has a truck and we were set.
Anything worth doing is never easy. We had to find a place to store the love seat while downtown Frederick was drenched by passing thunderstorms. Mom’s loading dock made the perfect hideaway. We had planned to start at 2:30 after the bars had all closed and the cars were gone, and be finished before the trash trucks and street sweepers took over. When the alarm went off at 2am the conditions were perfect. The reflection of the streetlights off of the wet street was an unplanned but welcome detail. We set it up (when I say we, I mean the boys), I did a few light tests and started shooting. I love that feeling I get when I know the images are going to be amazing. I had it then and it was contagious. I didn’t want to stop, but when the police drove by the third time they asked us to wrap it up. Still wired from the shoot I came home and started editing the images. There isn’t a lot of variety in the shots as we were working with one set. Here are a few of my favorites.
After seeing the images, my Mom is now ready to shoot her furniture line. So if you are driving down Patrick Street at 3am next week and see me standing in the middle of the street with my camera, you will not have to wonder what is going on.
