Carolyn - Portrait Session - Old City Philadelphia

Hello! I am very excited to share these images from Carolyn's portrait session with you. As with all of the sessions that I have done this year, I've been trying to take meaningful images that capture each person's personality. I've known Carolyn for a couple of years, but even if I hadn't I would've asked her several questions and gotten to know how great she is. She works really hard at everything she does. She is also very caring, happy, and fun to be around. She's the type of person who even when she is tired and has been working or studying all week, she still smiles all day and remembers to ask how your kids are doing. Knowing all of that, I tried to capture images that would remind her and others of who she is.

We got to the Race Street Pier at 5:45 in the morning in hopes of getting an awesome sunrise over the Deleware River, but due to the pending storm the clouds covered it up. We still had an awesome time, and it didn't rain like it was supposed to! I wanted to try out a new lens that I had gotten on ebay, so we did that first. It's an old 180mm Nikon lens from the late 70's. It's a manual focus and I really liked how dreamy the image quality is.

The first five minutes of a session, people are always stiff and awkward. It's a weird feeling getting photographed at first. You can't see what you look like and you're not sure if your arms, chin, hair, nose, eyes, legs, ankles, feet, or smile look good. All you know is that of the 600 selfies on your phone you only like how you look in two of them. At first it's hard to trust that what the photographer is capturing is going to make you look flattering, but that's what I do! I got Carolyn loosened up by trying some different poses: hands on hips, one hand on hip, turn away from me a little, not that much, pull your hair to the other side...stuff like that. Once I got the lighting right and got some good poses, then we started rolling. I got her laughing by telling her to imagine one of our male friends in a bikini. It worked well and she laughed and smiled. We took some great stuff under the bridge despite the yoga class attendees occasionally jumping in the shots. Then we walked around Philly. We changed outfits and took some shots in an alley. We also got some magazine lifestyle shots. I was going for a shot of her looking like she was off to a meeting at work. I really liked how they all turned out.

I hope you can get a glimpse of who Carolyn is through these portraits. If you would like to to do something like this, let me know. I would thouroghly enjoy working with you to create some good memories.

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Ted FelsbergJune 24, 2017Comment