Tah Tah Moore Pictures
Joseph
K, the senior, was such a trooper during her Claude Moore Park senior pictures in Sterling, Virginia. The weather was extremely windy and chilly. I am so glad we decided to wait until April to schedule this session because we were originally thinking of taking them in March. They had just arrived back from their spring break the day before the session, perfect timing!
These senior pictures were taken at Claude Moore Park in Sterlington, Virginia. I love this location for many reasons! There are so many spots to find a variety of beautiful backgrounds to use for a session. I have done fall family photos here before and I was excited to shoot here again. All the spots were perfect for all of the different outfits she had!
K brought A, her best friend, to her senior session. We photographed them together at the end of their session. They had so much fun together! They wore coordinating dresses; they are absolutely adorable together and we laughed almost the whole time. It was a lot of fun and the perfect addition to her senior pictures! I know that looking back on these and her friendship with A, these photos will mean so much to K when she is older and looking through her senior photos.
As a full-service photographer offering Northern VA senior pictures, I do offer studio portraits to my clients. Some high school seniors prefer the control of the studio lights, as well as the controlled temperature and lack of gnats and mosquitos and other creepy crawly flying things that are associated with outdoor, on-location photography.
Without getting too Freudian about the whole thing, I did have a relative, Silas Stone, who was my great-great-grandfather and made money in the real estate market in Cleveland back in the 19th century. He bought up river bank land in Cleveland that nobody wanted at the time but later was part of the valuable industrial area called the Flats. His granddaughter, Georgia Stone, was an heir and lived in hotels in Dresden, Berlin, and Paris, and finally ended up as a recluse in Hartford. She had all this money in the bank, but she went crazy and, in the end, was alone. At one point, her dog died and she simply rolled up the dog in a carpet in her house. My parents were the executors of her estate. They went to her house and found that dog skeleton inside a carpet.
This woman who had been so wealthy, summered in Newport, and had all these beautiful things, yet died from starvation in this mansion in Hartford. I think that made a big impact on me as a kid. How can we live in this kind of world of comfort, but right around the corner is the potential for it all to go wrong? My parents had this very strong belief in security and caring about the neighbors, but I never believed in that. I was interested in the opposite: What happens when all that security falls away?
Yes, definitely. I went to Princeton as an undergraduate and was very lucky to have found a master photographer there named Emmet Gowin. He was an extraordinary teacher, a charismatic and inspiring soul from whom I learned everything as his apprentice for three years. There was also a delightful professor in the history of photography named Peter C. Bunnell. So I had excellent training in terms of the craft of photography and also in terms of the history of photography and image making. I had an amazing education. I never went to graduate school because I felt like I just needed to go off on my own at that point.
I assisted for a bit in New York City for some still life and food photographers. Then I went freelance after that. I made a living photographing artwork for artists. I worked often for the Paula Cooper Gallery and met artists like Robert Grover and Elizabeth Murray, as well as many other artists in the city. It was an interesting and not too stressful way to make a living, so that was how I supported myself while I was doing my own work.
It was a shift in me as a person because I had worked previously as a solo practitioner. Then I got into filmmaking, and I made some short films. I even made a feature-length documentary. The way of working with other people in terms of filmmaking really informed how I started to approach photography. I began to work as a team. I had an assistant; sometimes, there was also somebody driving or working as a guide. Working in a kind of group situation changed my ability to make pictures.
7fc3f7cf58