christa & grace!

Christa is a lovely lady I've been mentoring for a while now. Not only is she from Wisconsin (like me), but she's also a very patient and understanding person. When she contacted me about mentoring her, I realized that I had no idea how to go about doing that. So it's been a win-win situation of me learning how to teach, and her hopefully learning a few things I've passed along.

She does beautiful family portrait photography, but she's helped me out with some wedding work too. You should totally check out her blog. I know she'll be updating it more soon, but she already has some of her wonderful shots posted.

Yesterday, she came over for one of our monthly get-togethers and she brought her super cutie-pie daughter Grace along. What a well-behaved little lady she is. Which is more than I can say for puppy Fletch, who I had to practically tackle to keep him from using Grace as a chew toy.

At the end of our meeting, we had just a few minutes to go outside to snap a couple pics. Grace was nice enough to model for us. The lighting conditions were bad, which is good when you're trying to teach someone. Because of trees in my yard and the time of day, the only light was very bright direct light with spotted bits of shade. If there had been an area of solid shade, we could have metered for that or filled in with flash. Instead, I figured we'd shoot with what we had and I could demonstrate how you can make that work when necessary.

Here are a couple pics that I took. Seriously...could she be more adorable? Nope.

Grace had just eaten a cookie, and for these shots, I decided not to edit out the chocolate evidence on her cute face.

Shots like these make me so happy. You can just feel the love.

Thanks Christa and Grace! I can't wait to keep working with you and learning with you!