Two of my oldest, dearest friends from summer camp days growing up are having a baby!

Over the holidays in Tennessee, we thought camp would be the perfect place to take some pre-baby portraits with the 2 of them and their sweet dog, Parker.

I won’t need to describe how much these two camp sweethearts laugh together…

I can’t believe it is winter again!  After a freezing cold late November portrait shoot on the High Line a few weeks ago, I was reminded that just because it is cold outside, it doesn’t mean you have to go indoors for portraits and loose the beautiful natural daylight.  Just plan ahead with a few layers of clothes, and you are good to go.

One of my favorite winter portrait sessions of 2013 was back in February on a cold Sunday afternoon. I went with Alissa Schwartz to Red Hook, Brooklyn to take some portraits for her to use on her business website, and it was a great success!  She had done her own location scouting and had found a variety of buildings to fit with the feel of her business – Solid Fire Consulting.  She wanted to convey a dynamic, enterprising feel, full of energy and fun, and she had picked some perfect colors as backgrounds to brighten up a gray winter day.  And she kept on laughing, despite the snow flurries and cold fingers and toes.  I think that is one of the key factors that makes great portraits – you can tell when someone is having fun.

Below are some of the photos from our afternoon ~ and then check out how the photos were used on her website.

One of my best friends has never really been happy with me taking photos of her – we’re talking for the last 16 years or so… until her baby Willa came along.

Here’s a few photos of three of my very favorite people, beautifully battling the wind in Prospect Park.

Thank you, sweet Willa!

Instagram = fleeting photos;

I have fallen hard for Instagram ~ in a photographer’s world of large photo files and overshooting and working with tons of photos every day, it’s allowed me a place to quickly document the small moments in a day that give me pause. And in New York, those moments happen all the time.

But not many people these days have the patience to go through a person’s entire feed of photos – you discover someone on Instagram and you probably scroll through a few pages of their most recent photos. Someone’s beautiful photo taken a year ago stays hidden to most. So there is a sense of impermanence.  And one thing that often gets lost in the speed of the mobile photography — letting a photo stay with you, re-visiting that photo that moved you to understand why you clicked ♡like, or to take a photo of that moment.

The city, too, is full of fleeting moments – fast paced with movements and a rhythm that creates a symphony all around us.

Here, a page of some city moments to keep re-visiting.

I have to share some of my favorites from this family portrait session ~ we’d been watching the weather all week to set a time to avoid a summer thunderstorm, but instead it started raining right when I arrived…  turns out that a little rain makes for some very fun family photos!