Holiday Festival of Lights

Articles Tagged with: Holiday Festival of Lights

Happy Holidays!

It’s that time of year and we’re just about done stuffing envelopes with our holiday cards. The photo above is the one we chose out of few family portraits that I made one night recently. I actually like the other two better as photographs, but the one above just worked better on the cards. It’s more about us in it then the scenery, where as this one is all about the location:

And this one is all about those pink fluffies in the sky:

I also shot Aurora’s first Christmas pics. Here’s my favorite of that bunch:

And you can’t celebrate the holidays without a trip to the James Island County Park for their annual Holiday Festival of Lights. We come for the lights, and stay for the giant toasted marshmallows…

I had a client who really wanted to do a downtown Charleston shoot for their holiday cards and only had one day to get it done, and it happened to be raining like crazy that day. I felt a little pressure to deliver in the studio, so I had this crazy idea for a family portrait and this was the result (I think they like it):

My daughter and son’s piano teacher held her first ever piano recital as well. She asked me to shoot this group shot of her students at the recital (thank goodness for bounce flash and white ceilings):

Something about this time of year really makes it feel special. I don’t know if it’s entirely a spiritual thing either – maybe for me it’s more of a reflection on the past year combined with the hope of a new one.

When terrible things happen as they did this past weekend in Connecticut, I’d like to think that instead of fighting with old and tired arguments that don’t fix any problems, that we could start to work together to make things better. I’d love for everyone to start listening to each other. I’d love for everyone to start empathizing with each other. We can’t control every awful action that may happen, but we can control how we rebound from it. Stop pointing fingers and start a new conversation, because the victims deserve better than a lot of what I see going on on the social networks.

Peace out for now.

Festival of Lights 2010

It took two attempts to get in, but we made it to the Charleston Holiday Festival of Lights at James Island County Park this evening. As usual, we listened to classic holiday music while driving though the park checking out the grand light displays. Nothing has changed about it in the six Christmases I’ve spent here in Charleston, but it’s always a fun time with the kids and it really makes the season feel complete.

Here’s a piece of the giant sand sculpture for this year, which was an underwater theme.

The line to get in earlier this evening was so long that we left and went to my brother-in-law’s home and hung out for an hour or so to wait out the crowd. The second time was a charm and we got to enjoy hot chocolate and roasted marshmallows.

The picture up top was just hand-held with no flash. I have a similar shot here that utilized a wireless flash being held by my daughter, but I lost the whole background with it (and I had it dialed down to 1/100th power). Sometimes the blurry shot captures the feel much better anyway. The second and third shots were taken with the camera held out of the sunroof in our mini-van. The sand sculpture was shot using the railing around the sculpture to steady the camera. The last shot of my son chowing down on a marshmallow was made with a wireless flash held in my left hand pretty much right over the fire pit – I had to be quick on that one!