Introducing Jazzi Girlz - apparel for girls
Last summer I had the pleasure of getting acquainted with entrepreneur, Tanaya Parker. Tanaya is a clothing designer and seamstress in the Metro Detroit area and the brainchild behind Jazzi Girlz. Jazzi Girlz is a line of boutique-style girl’s clothing as well as hair bows, refashioned denim, jewelry, accessories, room decor and more. Tanaya custom designs holiday outfits, party dresses and pageant couture.
The Family Room is excited and proud to be the official photographer for Jazzi Girlz apparel. I also designed her logo and business cards. This spring we will be putting out a casting-call for models in the 4t - 6t range. We’re looking for girls who can ham it up for the camera. Jazziness is a plus. Get your snapshots ready!
If you appreciate sturdy, american-made clothing with attention to details and if the little girls in your life have “the jazzi factor” then you should check out jazzigirls.com.
Special Projects
In 2008, The Family Room took on a couple of special projects. I teamed up with well-known Stamper, Scrapbooker and Paper-Crafter Erika Martin for The Soulology Project. The Soulology Project is a weekend scrapbooking workshop that helps women create scrapbook pages about themselves. Usually it’s the scrapbooker who is behind the camera, documenting their family’s lives. They seldom make pages about themselves and even if they wanted to, they aren’t sure what to write. Erika’s emotive course helps you get in touch with your soul and journal a legacy for your children. My job was to photograph all the participants so they would have photos of themselves for their scrapbook pages.
Erika also offers The Soulology Project and Journaling 101 as online courses through Papercraft Planet.
Here are just a couple of the women who attended the class in Pennsylvania this fall.
Nicole Seitler is designer and owner of Sugar Plum Paperie. She is a digital and hybrid scrapbooker.
Melanie is a Stampin’ Up rep who makes a lot of hand-made cards and posts them on her blog.
The other project is a partnership with JazziGirlz. I’ll post about that in a bit. I have a 1 month old coming in soon!
I’ve been tagged!
I have been “tagged” by my colleague Anna-Karin. This means I am to post a blog entry with the same theme in which she blogged. She was tagged by yet another photographer, and it goes on and on. I’m supposed to share a few factoids about myself. Oh boy, consider yourself warned. 
1 - My very first camera was a generic 110 camera. I don’t think it even had a flash. I found it on along the bank on a family canoe trip when I was a young child. There weren’t any identifying markings on the camera so there was no chance of returning it to it’s owner so my parents let me keep it. They bought me film and I began taking photographs of my family, our trips as well as my friends.
2 - My first darkroom experience was at Girl Scout camp right around 1983 I think. Every girl was given the opportunity to expose two frames on a roll of B&W film. Somebody processed it for us and we each got to make a print from one of our negatives. I printed a photograph of the other girls from my tent. I posed them in front of a field of tall grasses. I may still have the photograph somewhere in my basement.
3 - My senior year of High School I took two photography classes. For the first class, I used my parent’s Canon AE-1. Pleased with my enthusiasm, I received a Vivitar 35mm SLR for Christmas to use for my 2nd class. A year later I traded that Vivitar in towards a more fully featured Minolta. I forget the model number, but it had auto focus. Woo! It was a used camera, but it was new to me. I was really jazzed about auto focus.
4 - In college, I earned certification in “Audio-Visual Technology”. All of the photography courses fell under this category. I took various classes covering the history of photography, the fundamentals of camera operation, b&w, color and slide film, studio photography, portraiture and even a couple of cinematography classes.
5 - Over the years I’ve used medium and large format cameras, made prints from film & slides, sepia and selenium print toning, made and used pinhole cameras, cyanotype art and Polaroid transfers. I’d really like to do more transfers and cyanotype.
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Cyanotype is a fun and educational way to for your kids to explore the art of photography. Just pick up a Sunprint Kit of photo-sensitive paper, arrange some objects on top of a sheet and expose it to the sun. Then develop the print in a bath of plain tap water. Cyanotype is a lesson in chemistry, math and composition all rolled into fun. 
Now I tag Jessi Baldwin, Steven Fox and Erika Martin… and the theme continues.
I meant to do that!
No doubt about it, my portraiture is distinctive. I have a contemporary style and it is sometimes unconventional. My portrait clients are usually looking for something fresh, modern and more artistic that what many “traditional” studios offer. That being said, there are some characteristics you may notice when looking at my portfolio that is unlike what you might be accustomed to:
Cut me close - This means tight crops where the face fills most of the frame and the head is not included in it’s entirety. These images are about the eyes or the face. I meant to do that.
Left of Center - (or in this case, right of center) The most boring placement of a subject in a photograph is smack dab in the middle! I know, I know, not what you always thought, right? Trust me! There is a little something in design called the Rule of Thirds that we contemporary photographers often employ to enhance visual interest.
The rule states that an image can be divided into nine equal parts by two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines (like a tic-tac-toe board). The four points formed by the intersections of these lines can be used to align features in the photograph. Aligning a photograph with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the photo than simply centering the feature would.
Trust me, your son or daughter does not need to be right in the center of an image for it to be a good portrait! I meant to do that!
Turn That Smile Upside-down- So many of us have been brought up to believe that a smile is a requirement to make a great photo. So not true! I love a pensive look as much as a big grin. I meant to do that!
Negative Nelly â Negative space is when the subject is placed off to one side of an image and the rest of the image is emptyâthis is done for artistic impact. I meant to do that!
Bright Eyes - The hallmark of good portrait photography is good lighting, and the hallmark of good lighting is something called a âcatchlightâ â as mentioned in the previous article. I love big catchlights! I purposely position my lights or reflectors for the best and largest catchlights. Flip through any parenting or glamour magazine and look at the eyesâwhat do you see? Big bright catchlights! A lack of catchlights leaves the eyes looking flat, dull and lifeless. I meant to do that!
A New Slant - On rare occasions, only where it seems appropriate, I will tilt a horizon. I spent many minutes trying to think of reasons why, but I couldn’t come up with any. Sometimes it’s just fun. I only have two examples, and they’re both of my daughter. I meant to do that!
Focus Factor - Sometimes I use blur, or shallow depth of field to bring your attention to an area of interest. Sometimes as much as 85% of the image will be out of focus, leaving just one detail sharp. I meant to do that!
Shoot From The Hip - Not every image from your session is going to be a head & shoulder shot. I like to take images from all different perspectives and capture the details from a new angle. I meant to do that!
Don’t get me wrong, I do like traditional portraits, but I prefer to do all of the above. That’s my style.
Reflecting on Catchlights
I recently photographed the son of one of my friends. Upon looking at his gallery she inquired about the reflection of the studio strobe in his eyes. These are called “catchlights”. Catchlights are what give the eyes life and sparkle. Eyes without catchlights look cold and lifeless.
Below is a girl I photographed outdoors last week. The light in her eyes is a reflection of the sky to her right. She was leaning against a building to her left.
Below is the same image with the reflection of the sky removed. Notice how unnatural and dull her eyes look.
I hope that this has illustrated that catchlights are as common as eyes. Everybody has them unless you’re in a pitch black room. 
Even the cartoon artists at Nickelodeon draw catchlights in the eyes of their characters. Take Dora the Explorer for example.
My friend wasn’t used to seeing such large catchlights in her son’s eyes. She had previously taken him to a chain studio that uses the same lighting setup for every subject. At mall studios, the main light is across the room and leaves just a small speck-sized reflection like a point & shoot camera flash. I use varied lighting setups to achieve different results depending on what kind of image I’m going to make. Or in the example above, the sky provides the the light. Either way, there will aways be beautiful catchlights in my portraits.