Wedding Season Begins!

Wedding season is starting, and with it, engagement shoots! Last weekend I met with Liz and Mark to take some pre-wedding photos (their wedding is at the end of May.) I like doing these shoots for lots of reasons, but one of them is that I just like spending time with couples as adorably right-for-eachother as these two. They were cracking eachother up and having a grand old time. And they're not at all camera-shy, which is going to make my job on their big day that much easier. Hooray!

We started off the day at the Portland Nursery and then headed over to take pictures outside of the Goodfoot, which is where Liz and Mark met, and then abused some cherry blossoms. It was the maiden voyage of my new Nikon 70-200 vrII lens, to which I recently treated myself as an early birthday gift (happy birthday to me!) If anyone out there is on the fence about this lens, my two cents: I love it! It's sharp, it's fast, and the bokeh is really pretty. Everything I was expecting, and it's going to be a great addition to my bag for many wedding seasons to come.

I also found out that Mark is an illustrator and a comic artist. I can't draw worth spit, but I thought the lines and colors in this shot might work better as a drawing, so I enlisted the help of Photoshop to give it a kind of graphic look, in his honor:

Sample Wedding

Blurb now has a preview widget, so I thought I'd share a sample album I made with them a few years back:

Abby & Will by alyson levy photography | BOOK INFO

It's not your traditional leather-bound wedding album, but Blurb makes fun and easy-to-share photobooks.

Harper Ann, 7 Days Old

Last week I visited Harper Ann on her one week birthday; I got to take some photos of this sweet baby with her lovely moms. Such exciting times!

...and I tried something new: Baby Bits! What do you think?

Up Clothing Project

More beautiful kiddies! So here are some photos I took for a friend for her business, Up Clothing Project. It's a really cool idea: she up-cycles used shirts, turning them into adorable kid's clothes! Her designs are super-adorable, as were the little models she lined up for the shoot...

Hawaii

With all the lousy weather everybody seems to be having, I thought I would post a few shots "from the vault." I went to Hawaii on vacation with my family this past November, spent a week on Kauai'i in the sunshine...

A few people have expressed interest in purchasing my landscape prints for their homes. I hadn't really thought about it before, (when I'm taking photos like these, I'm mostly thinking about the annual calendar I put together for my mom at Christmas!) but if you are interested, email me.

Burn the Seed

A few weekends ago I went out to a gig to photograph Portland band Burn the Seed. This was my first attempt at band photography, and good times were had. First of all, I got to listen to great music while shooting. And I got to play with low light and some toy lenses. Even the post-processing was fun; there's more leeway to be creative with color and effects when working with photos of musicians.

Any other bands out there who need photos? I would love to have another crack at this...

Scott's new addition!

I recently got the chance to take some photos of my friend Scott's lovely family. I know Scott from my restaurant - he plays music there weekly (check him out here) and in addition to being quite talented he's just about as nice a guy as you can imagine. When I heard he had a new addition, I was excited to visit and take some pictures. As you can undoubtedly see, his family is every bit as delightful as he is...