feeling super inspired…

Our friends Megan and Brandon are coming to visit SLC for the first time and stay with us over 4th of July weekend. We’re so excited to have visitors! It’s still kinda weird not really having anyone but each other to hang out with… it’s a good thing we’re both major homebodies and are totally content to hole up inside for hours and read and drink tea together. It has made me realize how much I appreciate our marriage. We’ve spent pretty much every waking moment together for the past three weeks and still haven’t killed each other. In fact, we still LOVE being around each other. Mostly, anyway. :) But it will be nice to see a couple of other familiar faces and spend some time with friends for a change of pace.

I told Megan that when they come I really want to do a maternity session with her. I told her not to worry, that I wouldn’t make her expose her belly and have Brandon make a heart shape with his hands around her belly button. YUCK. It seems so awkward to me. I would gladly do that for a client if that’s what she wanted, but for me, I don’t know. I think a woman’s pregnant stomach IS a beautiful thing, and I would love to photograph the silhouette of it, but the thing I don’t understand is that most women would be extremely uncomfortable baring their stomachs when they AREN’T pregnant, so why all of a sudden when they do get pregnant, they’re all about stripping down and baring it all? Eh, maybe it’s just me. Luckily Megan’s on the same page as me (she wasn’t even going to do maternity pictures because she’s so turned off by the ones you see hanging in the food court in the mall), so for the past week or so I’ve been doing some brainstorming for our shoot. 

A few things that have been inspiring me lately:

The movie UP! 

You must see it right now. It is unreal how emotional and hysterical and poignant and insightful it is. As if we expected anything less of the Pixar people. Really. But aside from the storyline, I adooore the imagery of the house with the balloons.

And along the theme of balloons, I love THIS, from Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn (my favorite of her movies):

I love this movie because it combines many of my favorite things: Audrey (duh), photography (Fred Astaire plays a fashion photographer and uses a Rollieflex that Erin and I drooled all over ourselves in envy of when I made her watch it with me), fashion (it has a lot of The Devil Wears Prada-themes throughout), song and dance numbers, and of course my favorite era that somehow I missed by a couple of decades. Boo. But I love this one montage where Astaire’s character is assigned to shoot Audrey’s character all over Paris for a big fashion spread. Oh my word. Eye candy. Like whoa. And I particularly love this shot of her with all the balloons in the most classic black dress OF ALL TIME. Could she be more adorable? Possibly? 

So I’m thinking balloons are going to need to be involved in the shoot, because they are colorful and classic and they just POP (literally AND visually!). 

While we were on our daily walk this morning, I was brainstorming about other setups we could do, and I had this vision of a picnic-type setup in a big field, with books, flowers, and maybe an old school bike involved. Very colorful and bold, but just simple and happy and classic. I envisioned about a million different poses we could do…. I hope you guys are ready for this! 

But the really crazy thing is that this morning I stumbled across Phoenix photographer Stephanie Fay‘s blog from J*‘s blog. Well, lo and behold, her second entry down was THIS. How perfect and EXACTLY the sort of thing I had conjured up in my mind! Love it! So that pretty much sealed the deal for me. 

Now the execution is the only obstacle left. Hopefully I can make my vision into a reality, and if I fail miserably… well, let’s just hope that doesn’t happen. :) It may seem silly to throw all my ideas out there before actually doing the shoot, but I thought some people might be interested in the beginning stages of the artistic process that goes into this. Sometimes it’s just pure flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants and making do with whatcha got, but when I do have the chance to experiment and push myself (which is a lot easier when I have very attractive friends to use as my guinea pigs), it usually turns out so much better.

So we’ll see how it goes…