In addition to growing a little one in my belly, I am also currently growing a new area of my business in the coming year!  For the first time ever I have started offering formalized one-on-one mentor sessions! These are essentially similar to the workshops that I offer but since they are one-on-one they are personalized to fit the individualized needs of the amazing photographers that I get the pleasure of spending my time with!  Amazingly, (praise God!) without even starting to really advertise these sessions I am already booking them like crazy.  I cannot even tell you how much fun it has been to sit down with photographers like Sonal in the early stages of their business and give really personalized training not only in areas of technique that are giving them trouble but also in business basics like establishing pricing and packages, building clientele, portfolio development and even branding!

For this session I had the pleasure of spending half of the day with Sonal! A budding photographer in the Hyde Park area.  Sonal has a true creative eye and such a sweet personality.  She did a fabulous job working with our model Kortni (another local photog!) and I cannot wait to see where her business takes her this year! We spent the shoot portion of her mentor session talking about finding the right type of lighting to look for when doing an on location shoot.  I shared with her one of the lighting “equations” that I look for while out on a shoot (clean dark background, even light on the subject and a natural/neutral reflector bouncing light into the subjects face) as seen in the parking deck images.  Just lovely:)  Here are a few of my favs…

Thank you so much Kortni for your fabulous style, modeling skills and patience!

If you are interested in finding out more about SCP mentor sessions you can check them out here on the workshop website!

Also, I am looking for a “model” for another mentor session next week (Wed Feb 8th from 11:00-12:30) in the Tampa area.  Shoot me an e-mail at info@shaycochrane.com if you want to get in on the fun:)

…but there will always be a little bit of Riner, VA in Mrs. Ashlee Proffitt  Just in case I haven’t embarrassed her enough already with this week’s earlier post showing part 1 of her shoot with her sweet boys, here is another post dedicated to my beautiful friend and graphic designer extraordinaire!  This girl was in desperate need of updated pictures for her website – I will be the first to admit that the last ones that I took on the fly a few years ago  seriously did not capture her beauty or personality  So this time around we made sure to go with a look and feel that much more closely captured her fun, feminine and no-fuss style…while showing a bit of her southern roots and finding a little piece of “country” to shoot in out here in Tampa, FL (there are far more fields and cow pastures than one would expect out here actually!).  Anyway, I love them!    With the light changing so quickly during our quick shoot we were able to get two different fun looks, one a little more warm and sun washed and the other a bit cooler with a beautiful color palette. Here are my favs!

I recently did a two part shoot for my sweet friend and fabulous graphic designer Ashlee Proffitt that I have been itching to share!  As a part of some rebranding and new projects that she has on the horizon she wanted a few images that capture the half of her that her clients don’t get to see but is the driving passion behind everything that she does, and thats being a mom to her two boys (and little girl on the way!).  Ashlee is an incredible example of what it means to be a businessowner-entrepreneur-mom…the mom-ing is her first priority and everything else that she is able to accomplish flows out of that passion without disrupting her priorities.  I love her.  And I love these little boys as if they were my own:)  Here are just a few of my favs from her shoot! Enjoy!

Don’t even get me started! I have written about this before and think about it often as it relates to my work as a photographer and more importantly as a mom of an impressionable (princess and makeup enamored 2.5 yr old).

My practical advice for photographers is to know where you stand and how you feel about “modifying” your client’s images, especially if you are in the early stages of beginning your business when you are especially prone to wanting to do whatever you can to make everyone happy. I am not just talking about the the moral dilemma that it presents (what are we as photographers saying about what constitutes as beauty?) but even just practically speaking…is your bride under the impression that you are going to remove her wedding day acne out of 700 wedding images? Is mom hoping that you will take a few inches off of her in her family portraits – all 50 of them? If you do some of these more in depth edits to the “sneak peak” images that your client sees on your blog, will he/she be disappointed when she sees the rest of the images that didn’t receive that same hollywood treatment but are truer to reality? Why isn’t reality beautiful enough? Whatever options you decide to offer to your clients it is worth giving it some intentional thought and then educating your clients in a way that builds realistic expectations while helping them to see the beauty that you see in them. Learn to do the “hard work” up front of making your clients feel beautiful during the shoot which goes such a long way to getting beautiful natural images.  In addition,your compliments, coaching, outfit suggestions, lighting and posing can often do just as much as photoshop can.

On a separate note, as a mom blessed with the task of raising girls in today’s society (scary!) I want to make sure that my daughters understand the reality behind the message in this video and that they are constantly reminded of what biblical beauty looks like:

“Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” Prov 31:30

“I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, and my soul knows it very well.” Psalm 139:14

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

***Additional photo prints, high res digital negatives as well as additional Christmas cards can all be ordered separately for those of you with lots of friends on your list!

Meet the Winn family! We met up on Saturday evening for this family’s first (gasp!) professional portrait session! hehe.  Sweet little Meredith was instantly smiles and Riggs (who is almost my daughter’s age) did not disappoint with his dashing good looks and all-boy energy level.  We had a nice long session with time to get a little  bit of everything before the sun went down…we even had time to snap a few of just mom and dad – what a concept!  A self-described “classy but fun” family, I think these images capture both in addition to heaping piles of love:) Here is a little peak at some of my favorite images from their family session!

I mean really…is it entirely  fair that these two ladies got extra helpings of beauty AND talent?!  Meet Shem and Carolina, photographers and co-owners of Blue Lane Studios photography and Room 3307 boudoir photography!  These ladies are as fun and sweet as they are talented photographers.  It was so fun to get to shoot them and I was even more excited when I saw the fabulous vintage chair that they found which just happened to compliment their outfit color palette choice perfectly! (Us photographers are suckers for these kinds of things!) Be sure to check out their websites and show these ladies some love here on the blog!

Ok, so maybe that was a little tricky of me…hehe…maybe this is isn’t THE “big reveal” {those of you waiting to find out whether baby Cochrane is a girl or a boy will have to wait until tomorrow for that fun news.hehe. Graham is making me wait until later tonight to find out!} but while I have you here…you can check out the “big reveal” of the fun video that John Robinson of Robinson Imagery put together of the most recent photography workshop in Virginia! Thank you for the 3 minutes of fame John! You can also follow John’s work on his Facebook page. Just click below to check out the video and come back tomorrow if your curiosity is killing you (Mua ha ha)!

Last Saturday fourteen photographers got together in Charlottesville for the first ever Virginia installment of the SCP half day photography workshop that I hosted for beginner professionals!  (If you missed the fun images from that workshop you can check them out here!) The following day I hosted the very first ever SCP workshop for beginner hobbyists! It was basically an incredibly fun and laid back introductory course to photography that covered everything from understanding aperture, shutter speed and ISO to basic composition techniques.  The best part of the workshop was seeing the attendees get to put into practice what they had just learned during our mock children’s session! In between teaching I was able to snap a few pics of our ADORABLE models who were incredibly sweet, patient and well behaved during their shoot…did I already mention adorable? I may have pulled out a few fool proof kid portrait tricks like the gigantic lollipop to make sure that things went smoothly (…sorry moms)!  I am already in the planning stages to host this same workshop here in Tampa on Nov  4th and am looking for little “models” for that shoot as well.  Just e-mail me for specific details at info@shaycochrane.com if you know of any moms interested in volunteering there little princesses and super heros for the role! Thank you so much to our fabulously cooperative moms and their precious little models for your help during the VA workshops!

For more information on the upcoming Tampa, FL photography workshops check out the workshop website!  If you dislike boring cookie cutter back-to-school portraits as much as I do and want information on fabulously fun children’s portraits in the Tampa, FL area just shoot me an e-mail at info@shaycochrane.com!

So, what I wasn’t quite prepared for was that when I left Tampa at 7:00am on Friday morning it was about 80 degrees out and when I touched down in Roanoke, VA two hours later it was definitely 45 degrees! Brrr! Not that I didn’t love an excuse to buy another sweater while I was there! I really love any chance that I get to go back to the Shenandoah Valley.  It is just gorgeous and the landscape is so different from here in FL.  Sigh.  Before it felt like home I had to, of course, grab lunch at Sheetz along my 2 hr drive to C-ville in my sporty little Kia Rio rental car. haha. Graham was so jealous! (About Sheetz…not about the Kia. haha).  At one point I definitely got flicked off by a college student (we won’t name which school) b/c I couldn’t accelerate fast enough going over the mountains. bahaha.  My first time ever being flicked off while driving by the way! (Well….at least that I know of. haha) Anyway, the weekend of photography workshops in Charlottesville, VA were awesome! Both classes sold out and and we max-ed out our room once again. It was just so much fun, as always, to get to meet other photographers excited to learn more about the industry and improve their skills.  It wasn’t fabulous that for the big Saturday workshop I was running off of about 4.5 hours of sleep for two nights in a row but hopefully I had at least a few discernible sentences come out of my mouth. (Yikes!)  I have to give a massively enormous thank you to Ashlee Proffitt Design for all of the fun paper goodies that she made for my workshop attendees and Kristin Moore of Kristin Moore Photo (a sweet friend and talented Charlottesville photog) who helped me to pull the whole workshop together while I was states away.  Ali (another great VA photog) and Chad Williamson were our fabulous “models” for the mock engagement shoot and I wish that I could bring them to every workshop I teach!  They were so sweet and fun and adorable and easy to work with…and did I mention good looking? One more thank you goes out to Jen of Elan Charlottesville for her great work on Ali’s hair and makeup!

I am excited like a kid on Christmas morning to see the video that John Robinson shot of the Saturday Professional’s workshop but until then, you will have to just settle with a few of the shots that I was able to steal during the shoot portion of the pro’s workshop.  Enjoy!

Mark your calendars!  The next set of SCP photography workshops will be held in Tampa, FL on Nov 4th and 5th!  Tickets are on sale now!  :)