Jessie's Back!!!

I didn't break her!

LooK --->

Jess was always my favourite model... agreed to have photos taken almost anytime and would let me experiment and posed so well...
Then I broke her :(
I'd posed her so often that she couldn't act naturally anymore.

Every photo I got of her was fake, forced and uninspiring...

So I gave up for a while... still took happy snaps and all but nothing serious.

The other night I was showing a friend some of my favourites from this year on Hello and we both noticed that I hadn't taken many of Jess at all this year.

Also, her birthday is next month and she's having her party here (YES!) so we decided on photo invites. She was going to use one of the photos taken in October but she's changed a lot since then and I wanted to see if we could get something fresher...

I happen to think we NAILED it! And I'm sooooo freakin' happy with them.

I love colour... it's so bright, happy, fun... out there...

but I'm really lovin' B&W lately too.

This one just blows me away....

Remember - she's only 11 years old! She turns 12 at the end of next month.

We spent about 20 mintues on this shoot... definitely not more then 30. It was all natural light, with a reflector. We had a brick wall for the background. I had quite a few other 'good' shots but next to these they just looked pale... she also thinks she's older then she is and tries to pose more suggestively... she KNOWS that I don't allow this and she also knows upfront that I'll delete any like that (why do I take them? Sometimes she moves just as I click or I don't realise until after I've clicked)

For processing... all the colour ones are with my Colour BAM! action, plus a new skin technique I'm trying to get right. The B&Ws are my own conversion. I burnt a vignette onto each of them. They're all in camera crops too... except that I cropped a little of the ends to be 5x7.