Author photos—I put them off as long as I could. I waited until I knew the feel we were going for on my new website (coming soon!!). I waited until the photographers had come up with a package and some cool locations that would work. I waited until I could go in for a cleaning at the dentist. I waited so I could have time to shop for the perfect outfit. (Which I found…but they don’t make it for my size. Go figure.) (Did I just admit that on the world wide web?!)
Finally I decided just to get it over with. The waiting was making me even more nervous. I conferred with the photographers, decided on the next Friday…and when Friday came, we all found out that people have different definitions of “next”. Oops.
We rescheduled. Then needed to reschedule again. Lots of frustrated shopping and angst filled up that time. I practiced facial expressions in the mirror…although I didn’t remember any of them during the shoot. I even did a fashion show for my best friend Tonya and her baby Tyler to try to decide on what to wear. Tyler wasn’t much help. Tonya was.
But I wanted a second opinion, so the night before the shoot, I tried on some of the clothes again for my indulgent husband. He snapped a few pictures himself just so he’d remember what the outfits were when it came time to choose. (Really, it wasn’t THAT many.) After he took one picture, he told me, “Jenness, you really need to figure out what to do with your hands.” So I picked the shirt that covered them…
Saturday morning at 8:00, I met my photographers and climbed into their car, ready to be tortured for the next couple of hours. John Paul and Jolie Churchill are a husband and wife team that I’ve known for a long time. That was good, in that I was comfortable around them. Bad, because it was very strange to stare at John Paul for so long…
JP and Jolie knew how nervous I was, and they came prepared. Between JP kicking in the door of the shack (it was unlocked but stuck) in a move worthy of SWAT, Jolie muttering “ow” every two seconds as she worked her way through the underbrush, and the jokes they cracked, it was almost fun.
The first setting was a deserted shack. Two minutes in and my lips were already shaking and my eyes were squinty. I’m so not cut out for this stuff. We could be seen from a busy road, so I got kind of tickled at what some of the drivers might have been thinking. Wondering if I was someone important? No, they probably thought I was a high school senior. I still get that a lot…
I changed clothes in the Churchill’s darling house, then it was off to shoot some more. The second location was in a burned-out section of woods. The plants were growing back, but it still had a cool effect. And I was glad I’d worn mostly black because the ash left streaks all over JP and Jolie’s khaki clothes. Jolie had this idea to hang an old-fashioned mirror on one of the blackened tree trunks. It was awkward—I had a hard time not continually adjusting my hair or my facial expression since, well, it was a mirror. But I loved the end result.
The shoot took two or three hours. I discovered something else I can’t do—cock my head one direction and look in the other. (Hey, you try it.) I was exhausted when I got home. And I checked the Churchill’s blog a couple times daily to see if they’d posted any samples until I received the proofs. (Yes, JP, that’s why your traffic was up. I checked. Jason checked. Tonya checked.) If you want to see the samples, check out their blog at http://www.churchillsphotography.blogspot.com/.
Thanks, John Paul and Jolie. (Check out their website at http://www.churchillsphotography.com/.) All in all, it was a good experience…but not one I want to repeat for the next twenty-years or so, okay?
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