Naperville Photographer | Storytelling Photography

I have goals for 2016, and top amongst them is my plan to enter into the big world of PPA image competitions.  While I have successfully competed in the National Association of Professional Child Photographers, the PPA is the ….well, it is the IT.  LOL  And I wanted to put forethought into my images that I plan on entering.  I had this idea since summer and shot it in September, I believe, but fall was incredibly busy, so I never got a chance to edit it and create my vision for it.  Thankfully, since this was shot for my competition purposes, I didn’t have a deadline on finishing it.  I’m glad I didn’t because I would have been rushed.  So let me introduce you to an image I am very proud of – how it will do in competition remains to be seen, but I look forward to learning from the process and continuing to improve my work.  This is a new look for me.  If you are a potential client and want to do a storytelling, creative session like this, the pricing will include a hefty creative fee due to the amount of work behind the scenes in creating it.

Let me introduce you to The Princess and Her Frogs.  There are ten frogs in the below image.  Can you find them all?

 

She had so much fun getting dirty.  I wanted her truthfully dirty, so she rolled on the ground, and we added water to some dirt to get on her clothes and skin.  Loved it!

 

Now, the reason it looks like something out of an illustrated children’s book is because of the work involved.  Want to see what was involved?  So I photographed the girl on a day when I had no frogs ready, as you can see, she just held the empty jar.  Then separately, my kids went frog hunting in the evenings, and found a couple, which I then photographed in the backyard in different positions. I knew I wanted lilly pads and simply lucked out with catching a frog in water.  But I ended up not liking the setting as well, so I went to another image of mine and copied just the grass and melded it with the other.  Then got just the tree, etc.  It was a lot of work, but hopefully it all looks seamless in the end, creating a beautiful image.