I tell people that I love gardens, but hate gardening. To me it is like making a salad.... It always tastes better when someone else does it for you. What does have to do with photography? Read below...
When my friends, David and Julia, suggested that we spend an afternoon with the kids in a place called Gibbs Gardens, I grabbed my camera.
I reckoned that this would be an incredible place to make some photos of the whole family. It is a bit of a drive from Atlanta, but makes for a nice adventure.
A photographer dreams of such a setting. If you are ever in Ball Ground, Georgia, it is worth a visit. Pay the $20 to get in or buy a season pass. Check out the Gibbs Gardens web site.
The photos were taken in the time that is not yet Fall in all its glory, but well past Indian Summer. There were patches of green and gold mixed together like a forrest in transition.
The last ime I took photos of the kids, we were confined to mostly indoors. Elijah was as that age where I was doing more chasing than shooting. I had to invent games to trick him into staying in one spot for longer than 2.5 seconds.
The kids had grown since then and so they were larger targets and reasoning with them was a possibility... not just a theory.
When we got to the location, it started to drizzle so we grabbed a quick lunch and crossed our fingers that it would blow over. It never really did, but we started our walk through the incredible vistas and designs of the gardens anyway. My favorite area was the Japanese Gardens. Wow!
The children's great grandparents were with us that day which is incredible. I never met mine so this is a foreign concept to me.
I like to take mix of formal and informal portraits. I think it is important to capture the interactions between parents and children when their guard is down. One day the children may look back on the photos and see that their folks were once young too.
The other thing I like to emphasize is size differences. David is almost double the size of Elijah.
Which means he could act like he was going to dunk the poor boy. That would have been hard to explain to Mom.
I also like to shoot generations, whether they are blood related or not. Here are the ladies of the Struve family.
For a few moments, the light would appear turning the leaves to photo gold, but it was rare that day!
Overall, it was a wonderful day in country. I guarantee we all slept soundly that night.
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