A Sunset Session

Last weekend one of my best friends from college, Lauren came into town from Lynchburg to visit. We had a lot of fun catching up and discussing our favorite subject.. Art. I met Lauren at the beginning of my senior year at University of Mary Washington which was her junior year. We had Painting 1 and Photo 1 together. I remember having seen her around the year before but never interacted with her and what is funny is that our initial judgments of one another in those 1st two classes together were pretty much the same. We both of the other were kind of like "who is that girl? I'm the outspoken one during critiques, who does she think she is?" Haha, needless to say we quickly got over our prejudgments and became fast friends, a friendship we continued to nurture after my graduating and moving to Arkansas for a year while she finished her senior year and then my moving back home to Richmond and her to her home in Lynchburg. Lauren is now an elementary school art teacher and as far as I'm concerned.. thriving in her 2 years new job. She's the friend who keeps me accountable to my art, to creating, to never stopping what I'm passionate about.. and vice versa. Anyway, during her 2 day visit we went to see the Chihuly exhibit at the VMFA.. and wondered over the beautiful works and colors.. while I reminded her not to touch! Ha, Lauren is notorious for wanting to touch things in art galleries even though as artists we know better because she is very tactile. We also grabbed lunch at Garnett's and stopped by Rosewood Pottery Studio so I could show her around. On Saturday she tagged along with me very patiently while I shot Megan and Kristen. It was a fun girls adventure for the four of us! And then I insisted she let me shoot some photographs of her. She will be the 1st to tell you she doesn't like having her picture taken and isn't into documenting her life with pictures the way most of us do now a days. Its one of the places we differ artistically but it leads to some great, thoughtful discussions between us. All I can really say about this girl is that I love her as a friend, as a sister in art and in faith and that I think she is just incredibly beautiful and has great presence in front of the lense even though she is usually behind it!

The above image and left image below are straight from the camera. Lauren's images ended up being some test subjects for some new actions I downloaded recently from the CoffeeShop blog and then played with levels and deleted/ edited further to get to what I liked!

And just for fun.. one of us together..bein all artsy serious and shtuff! I used my Nikon remote... which is so worth the investment!

If you like what you see and are interested in getting some professional photographs of yourself or family like my facebook page https://www.facebook.com/SHEdesignswithgrace I will be posting very reasonable January sessions and prices in the next few days!!