I’ve been so busy working on photos from my second session this month that I never got around to posting about the first session!  But here they are- better late than never, right?

My cousin married my sister’s all-through-college roommate, so I feel kin to both of them!  They live in the Chicago area, and I’ve been trying to get together with them for photos for a long time.  Finally, after their second baby was born in November, I went up there with my equipment and we got some holiday and family photos done over a two day stretch.  It was a great little trip for me, and we did both posed portraits as well as candids.  Photography has me learning all about the many moods of toddlers.  I may have been quite the babysitter in high school, but that never required the eye contact and smiling that photography does!

The big sister.

And she’s 2!

The little sister.

With little pink baby toes.

I really love doing the casual candids.  It’s so much easier to coax smiles out of a wary toddler when they have slides and swings around, rather than while they’re trying to decipher the strange equipment in the place where their living room furniture usually goes!

I bought a red Holga toy camera a few weeks ago, and it’s fun to be playing with film!  I took it to the Lake of the Ozarks for a family weekend.

The fun part of Holga cameras are the happy accidents that result, and my first roll was complete with some of those!  I made a mistake with the settings and the photos overlapped, but they turned out ok.

I’m dropping my second roll of film for processing today.

It’s been such a photo-intensive spring, summer, and fall that I only recently got around to post-processing photos from my family’s Fourth of July Reunion!  It seems pretty crazy to be looking at red, white, and blue, shorts and tank tops with the temperature hovering in the mid-fifties and a possible frost coming soon.  But I’ll stay on top of things and bring you some autumnal colors to make up for it soon.

The reunion was held at the Mineola Baptist Church outside Mineola, Missouri, where my grandmother and her two sisters grew up on a farm in the Loutre Valley, about twenty miles northwest of Hermann and an hour east of Columbia.  They did not attend this church, but the land is now owned by my great-aunt and her husband, and it’s run as a church camp.

It was a great place for us to have a family party!  Here is most of the family gathered in front of the church.  They are laughing at me as I try to get them to smile pretty for the camera.

My grandmother and her two sisters.

Playing a horseshoe kind of game, with a washer instead of a horseshoe.

It was a pretty day and a nice reunion!  I’m sorry it took so long to process these.

It is a big week for me!  Last night I had a family shoot; this morning (at 5am on a bluff overlooking the Hinkson Creek in Columbia), I was the second-shooter at a very small wedding; and I have another family shoot on Saturday.  I had managed to get all my photos done, but now I’ve got several weeks’ of work ahead of me.  I’m not complaining!  It is fun to do, but it is work.

Here are some pictures that I took at a recent family party for a cousin who graduated high school.  He was, unfortunately, upstaged by the adorableness of another cousin’s almost-two-year-old daughter, who was very cute in her pink jacket and a pink baseball cap with Missouri emblazoned on it.

I always end up shooting her at family functions, even if she is not the guest of honor.  So when some of the older kids in the family started playing frisbee, I had to break away and spend some time with them instead, just to shake up the usual pictures.  I’m not much of a sports shooter, but it can be fun once in awhile.

She is pretty photogenic, though, don’t you think?