Grandma Minnie’s Birthday

Grandma Minnie’s family celebrated her birthday recently with a photo shoot! Lots of pictures below, and if you didn’t get a chance to see the sweet slide show yet, please email the family for the link. What a beautiful gift for the person who has everything!

I love the picture above! One of my new faves!

The room was totally dark except for a few candles on the cake and that table lamp way in the background. I took this shot with a high ISO and low shutter speed, with the camera just hand-held. (No tripod.) I love my new camera!

Isn’t Grandma Minnie beautiful? I love this untraditional portrait because of the children just hanging around in the background. Those are two of Minnie’s great grandchildren.

This one was taken earlier in the day with just window light. Again, it’s not a traditional portrait, but that’s what I like about it. I can’t help wondering what the baby is looking at.

We set up for some informal shots of the individual families, but I like to swing around and see what’s going on at the sidelines! I love this shot! So much depth and motion going on here, nice angles and I love the posture of Grandma Minnie and her grandson, John, sitting criss-cross on the floor. I wonder: how many times over the years has John sat at grandma’s feet just like that?

This is more of a traditional posed snapshot. What I love about it is the blurry people in the background.

We were so lucky that it snowed a few days before our shoot!

The kids had fun sledding.

See?

Sledding makes for great natural smile shots!

And I love the girls’ snow suits and fun hats!

No shortage of happy smiles, and these girls are getting used to the photo shoot routine. This is their third shoot with me!

Love the light in this one, and his sparkly eyes.

Later in the evening, he went around the room collecting $5 bills. NOW he’s smiling a natural smile! Love it!

Snow is a natural reflector. It really adds nice sparkles to eyes!

Of course, it helps if you have gorgeous eyes, like these two.

I love the snowball fight pictures with grandpa too.

This one is a classic. I remember eating off of a TV tray at my Grandmother’s house in Atlanta 30-something years ago, but I don’t have any pictures of that. I love this shot.

This one is my new favorite of all time! The little boy peeking from behind the piano is Grandma Minnie’s great grandson. Nobody prompted him to go back there; he was just hanging out listening to the music. And isn’t it SO COOL that Grandma Minnie still plays the piano at 97 years old!!

May we all be so blessed.