Good Morning!
I promised last time to place extra photos of my mom after they will be edited. As a portrait photographer its fun to see transition from original shot to the perfect photo. My editor from England does a marvelous job and I trust him with beautiful photos. He tweaks just enough, for you to see the same person just with a little bit better look. When I see how some photographers edited their work, I just tend to cringe. Over doing with Photoshop isn’t good either, you have to have a limit on your craft. Smudging people and that is what usually people do , makes clients look unreal and not human, they look more like dolls or robots. Even my two editors sometimes go beyond my taste and I always ask them to fix it. There is a limit to everything, anything beyond that start to look crappy.
So my young mother turned 55 this year, I promised to do her session. Even she liked the idea, she wasn’t ready for it for couple of months. Her birthday was in January and I think I started mentioning it in December, we actually shot in May. I hired Destini to do her hair and make up and we pulled couple of clothes and a fur coat from her closet. With the help of a talented photographer Sue Bryce, I used her ideas of how to pose my mom. I would never thought of placing a woman over 55 on her stomach but I think they are some of my favorite shots. It definitely allows women to stop thinking about how they look and stop thinking about sucking in their stomachs. She definitely relaxed a little more and we got some awesome shots.
My mom’s house has a perfect room for a photographer, it has windows all over the one side of the house from the ceiling all the way down to the floor and also has windows on the roof. I was glad that it was cloudy day since this is a new norm for New Jersey. We will call it soon the cloudy state , because half of the time we see only clouds. This time around it was a plus for me and I used only natural light.
I don’t have a studio yet, I am thinking of building it in my basement. I have large windows there too. Its not as large as my mother’s but decent enough to shoot. So for now I travel to customer’s homes or doing it outside. So if you are interested to do a similar shoot like that, just email me so we can meet and talk about your closet and set things up. My email: maria@mariamanjelo. com
P.S. the little girl in the first photo is my daughter, she jumped in the photo. This was just a test photo we wanted to see how make would look and also the hair. The hair didn’t work so we took the curls down but the shot is awesome.
