Last Minute Mini Sessions

OK, so it isn’t last minute YET. But November 13th, believe it or not, is last minute from the custom photography standpoint what with that whole editing each image individually thing. November 15th is the last day for sessions with guaranteed holiday delivery (and PLEASE tell me if your holiday is Hanukkah so I can bump you to the top of the editing queue) and this day of mini sessions is a good way to get prints and cards. It isn’t a full session. You can’t do a simply babies style newborn shoot. You can, however, get a nice, small selection of gorgeous pictures to pick out some images for the holidays.

Each session is $50, 20-30 minutes long and you can expect 5-10 proofs from which to choose. (Thus, “mini” – shorter sessions, fewer proofs, lower cost.) The session fee includes the session itself; all prints, cards, products and files are seperate. You can, however, opt to pre-order a session disk at a reduced cost. All sessions will be at the Trout Brook Greenway in West Hartford.

There are limited spots as, well, the day is only so long and I have yet to find a way to stick extra hours into one. So I would recommend reserving a time slot now, even if this is hardly last minute, since if you wait until the last minute you may be stuck with an 8AM time slot!

Click HERE to book!

This little dancer had a session at Trout Brook last year. I’ll be in knee high boots in case I need to go into the stream for good lighting but I won’t ask you to get wet in November!

A Few from the Haddam Neck Fair

I know, I know, they are in color. Don’t get attached. I got a roll of (very) expired color 120 film from my mother when I was in Maine and ended up not using it until we went to the fair.

I went up on the Ferris wheel with the kids. They know about Ferris wheels thanks to Charlotte’s Web, which has been read to them twice and the original (badly) animated movie version of which they have seen. Fern leaves Wilbur at the Blue Hill Fair to go on the Ferris wheel with Henry Fussy, so they were all excited to go on it. Now, Ferris wheels make me nervous. I love roller coasters but something about Ferris wheels is just stomach churning for me. Maybe it’s all the admonitions not to rock. What happens if we rock?

I stayed calm by taking pictures.

When I looked over my film I saw that I was not the only one enamored of taking pictures of the view from the wheel.

After that the kids got to go on ride by themselves. James wanted to go on the cars. He has a thing of vehicles of all sorts. Despite the look on his face he was having a wonderful time. He looked deathly serious on every ride.

Fiona adored the mini roller coaster. She is her mother’s child.

And a one more general issue fair picture.

(Also, holgarama is having a contest and if you are a holga loving shooter you may find it amusing!)

Carpe Diem

I used to be a teacher. What did I teach, you ask? English and Latin. No, really. Amo, amas, amat and all that. One year I took a group of teenagers to Italy to see Roman ruins (and, no, I’m not insane – they were really good kids). One way to feel old is to realize that the boy in this picture, the college graduate in this picture, was on that trip. The stunning girl, who was just a little kid, is his younger sister and is now in high school at Miss Porter’s.

I’m so old. Time, as they say, is the devourer of all things. (Tempus edax rerum – have to share a little Latin now that I’ve mentioned my pedantic past.) I used to have “tempus fugit” (time flies) posted by the clock in my classroom figuring that everyone would end up remembering at least one phrase forever, much as I will never forget that the Magna Carta was signed in 1215 for the sole reason that was the time my own Western Civilization class got out for lunch; 12:15 was a number much on my mind during that history class.

tri-x 400

I’ll leave you with one more Latin phrase: Tempus omnia sed memorias privat. (Time deprives us of all but our memories.)

One to make you smile…

Well, you can’t be serious ALL the time.

A Sunny 3-Year-Old

One adorable girlie…

And a few quick questions for mom…

Can you describe Soleil in one word?
Sassy

What is your favorite thing to do together?
Go to the beach.

What is the best thing about 3-year-olds?
The stories she tells.

What does she do that just makes you melt?
When she says, ” I love you, Mama,” and looks up at me with those olive eyes!

If you could have one wish for her, what would it be?
To be happy forever and always!

Balance

School has started. The quest for balance consumes a lot of my day, especially during the summer. I’m lucky, very lucky, that the work I do is flexible in its hours. However, any given day finds me banging about like a pinball. The house needs cleaning. The laundry needs doing. The food needs buying, putting away, taking out preparing, cleaning up after. The children need to be read to. They want to play. One wants to play Candy Land. One wants to play Hide ‘n Seek. The phone is ringing. Man, I hope that’s not a client because I just can’t pick it up. The mail is piling up. I have 3 sessions to proof. Let’s go to the fair and pet the snake. Oh look, the scarves have arrived. I need to make time for the children to paint them. By the way, if you’re related to me, you’re getting a 4-year-old painted silk scarf for Christmas. Surprise. I adore my children, love them madly past all reason, but I’m really glad school has started. (Picture is a neg scan of a shot I got of James last August in Maine using tri-x 400. Now that school has started maybe I can even get over the the darkroom to take a stab at printing some things…)

The Boat House

There was a cartoon on the door of one of my graduate school professors*. It showed a group of vikings standing around a boat pulled all the way up onto the beach while a town burned in the background and a large group of angry townspeople approached. The caption read something like, “Everybody? Sven, whose job it was to read the tide charts, has something he would like to say to you.” I described that to my husband once and he looked at me and said, “What? I don’t get it.”

“The tide is out, their boat is stranded and they can’t leave.”

“Oh.”

When you grow up on the water tides are not something you need explained. I grew up on the bay you see here, to the left a bit. This is the family boat house, which is locked and which, to the best of my knowledge, no one uses though there are three random extra boats, states of repair unknown but likely bad, simply sitting around it. Three families use it, and we caught a ride from one of them out to their camp where we hiked, showed Fiona a 70-year-old stone lookout and told her it was a fairy house, and had some fabulous lobster stew. We’ll be going back next summer to camp ourselves and clear some of the many fallen trees, victims of spruce budworm. Maine gets in your soul. You can leave, but the longing to go back is always there.

I took this with a holga in the boat on the way back from our afternoon away from computers, clocks, iPhones, electricity and running water. It’s a few moments before we left a world of measuring time by the tide.
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* My MA is in Medieval Studies and if you can find a less useful master’s degree I’d love to know about it because, really, I think a full year of Old Norse pretty much wins any “least useful” contest. No, I don’t actually remember any of it, though I have started reading Norse myths to my children.

Sweet Newborn