the very picturesque baker family enjoyed an evening at the circus.. you would have thought through the eyes of their 5 yr old son, brody, that this was the real deal. “you never can know a man unless you put yourself in their shoes and walk around.” isn’t that the wise quote from Atticus in to kill a mockingbird? as i worked through this session i wanted to do that with brody’s shoes. i have never had as captivated an audience as this young boy. watch his face through the shoot and i guarantee the same joy i felt. the look of total commitment to the moment… the family played. i clicked away. from sketches to shoot, every single thing worked. amazing!!!
seriously watching the “show”!! believe it or not it was a 60 degree evening with some wind.. we wanted these little guys to be barefoot. with this look you would never know there was momentary resistance at first, BUT between games and circus treats, there was not a complaint from beginning to end! [bribery is awesome] these little brothers are the BEST!!
i think i want to gobble him up!!
i see you, jude!!
and where would any circus be without a ring-of-fire to jump through? so funny! i was laughing so hard i don’t know how i kept any sort of focus. i was definitely off on my distance for the lens, but hats off to robert and brody on this one!
our last hoo~rah was popcorn… everyone in the USofA was posting images of their kiddos making snow angels. though texas had an unseasonably cold winter, we didn’t see much snow. so i figured popcorn could give us the ground cover to make some of our own kind of angels at the circus. five pounds of corn and three hours of popping filled one large black trash bag… wish i had doubled that ~ but i think both brody and jude were overcome with their opportunity to hang out in the center of a pile of white stuff. and eat it too for that matter. this will end our affair on a hilltop in the country of texas. it was a shoot like no other i have done. hearts to this family!
thank you my dear friend, kim, for use of your beautiful land… thank you for the assist, dominique holmes… thank you leigha and dan taylor for hand spinning the cotton candy… thank you, my husband, for many trips to asels in dallas for cardboard and other things needed to create these props, for patience while i worked and designed this shoot during your precious few hours of home life on the weekends…
the portuguese gathered on hagewa dr on a late summer’s eve. well, ok, not so romantic a day… a 90 humid-degree day of september. we came in from dallas altogether ready for the sweet breeze of autumn in ohio. a long knit skirt and blouse bought to wear, vintage table-clothes packed, new grandson in tote ready to meet more family, all the photographs i wanted sketched out and a vision that had been in my head over this past year for a real kinfolk table setting! not much of that materialized… i could hear wesley saying to buttercup, “get used to disappointment”! for the most part we were in shorts, jeans and t-shirts with the last drop of summer’s sunscreen smeared on our faces and dripping with sweat. not all of the family could be present… so to two of my own daughters, jordan and isabel, and nieces and nephews, katie, emily, daniel, bess and to my cousins, jamie and jody, — {all spouses and children thereof} you were missed so very much. our table would have been wonderfully endless if all were there. in the end, it was just a picnic. a really really nice picnic like the summer ‘family’ picnics we had growing up… maybe what we knew as kids at sharon woods, pushing picnics tables together and throwing the tablecloths out, watching the great uncles play chess and the young ones play kickball, softball, badminton and checking out the creek bed for fossils and salamanders… a day when most of the extended family could gather bringing their best part of the smorgasboard, was really a ‘kinfolk’? i think so, which would make us ~ hipsters!!.
while tables were being set outside… soup and a sundry of other delicious portuguese morsels were being prepared inside… with a busy one-year-old at our knees 🙂
yep ~ we celebrated the lucky ones of the family who have birthdays in september!
words of my mom ~ the first generation of american portuguese from the ‘do Adro’ family… “My grandmother, Beatriz Oliveria Do Adro, came to America from Lisbon, Portugal, on the SS CANADA. A then single mother due to divorce, she brought two of her four children with her: my father, Henrique {Henry} and his sister, Luiza {Louise}. My father was nine years old. the year of transport was either 1922 or 23 with a discrepancy of age listed on the manifesto. Their port of entrance is unknown… though I am sure someone in the family will someday research that fact! Grandma moved her little family directly to Cincinnati, first living in Corryville and then settling in Madisonville. She followed the lead of her brother who was already living in America. She took a job as cook at the Cincinnati Hebrew Union College where she met Ted Haynes. They later married, making her the grandmother fondly remembered as ‘Grandma Haynes’.” {grandma haynes is pictured in the small oval frame above}
when stacey approached me about photographing her family, we talked about the usual things in an interview… personalities, places for the shoot, and {since this is the season of christmas family sessions} how we could collaborate and develop a christmas theme. surprisingly, stacey said that was a sort of by~thought. to include it would be fine, but what she really wanted to begin for her young family was documenting yearly the changes… marking time. yes! indeed the best answer anyone could give a photographer. so here is the product and matching of her heart’s desire. i love this family’s beginning ~ married 4 years, daughter at age one. AND a lil’ merry christmas tah boot!
