Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Summer 2010 – First stop, Florida

I was working on some photos from our interior trip to Algonquin Park, when I realized that I hadn’t done a post with pictures from our trip to Florida for our kick-off to summer (ie. May 2-4 week). I had done a running related post on my other blog, but forgot to post photos to this blog.

Ryan and I flew to Orlando, Florida on Saturday, May 22nd with our friends Wayne and Kathleen. We stayed at the Marriott Cypress Harbour for the week, which was quite nice. We had a condo-style suite and had access to several pools on the large vacation property. Unfortunately, we did not spend as much time lounging on the property or swimming in the pools as I would have liked, but that’s only because we were out having fun at the many parks in the area.

During our vacation, we visited Sea World, went on many water slides (all of them) at both Sea World’s Aquatica and Wet ‘n’ Wild, and enjoyed the rides and sights at Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure (the Hulk coaster was very fun!). After our days out, we spent a few nights at the various establishments on Universal City Walk.

It was a good week. For the most part, I did not lug around an SLR, but I did walk to Sea World for a strictly photo taking day after we had already been there to experience the park.

The dolphin show was fantastic, so I definitely wanted to go back and take some photos of it. It’s difficult to capture the magnitude of the show as there was so much great choreography with the dolphins and the energy was amazing as well.

I have a few more photos of the dolphin show on Flickr, but the above photo was my favourite of the craziness that is a live animal show.

We saw some other great creatures at Sea World. Here are a few:

 

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Family Portrait: Jeffers Family

On June 27th we had the opportunity to photograph a wonderful family, the Jeffers. We had made arrangements to meet up that afternoon and we planned on photographing outdoors as long as the weather cooperated.

When we arrived at Mykel and Tracy’s house, the weather was “iffy.” We went outside to check out the yard and when we were only out there for a couple of minutes, it started to rain.

As you can see, some of the children didn’t mind, but the rain wouldn’t have worked out so well for the photo session.

As the rain poured down more and more, the formal living room was being re-arranged to accommodate the family portraits. Looking outside, we noticed that it had died down and that the neighbours were actually taking some photos outside of their house. So, back outside we went.

The weather held off for the remainder of the afternoon and we got a good variety of photos involving 7 people and one dog. It can be an interesting time when working with several kids and you always get some of them hamming it up for the camera, some with upset kids, and hopefully some with everyone happy.

When we were all packed up and ready to go, the rain came down hard suddenly. We made a run for the car and all was well.

Here are some of the photos from the shoot:

 

More can be seen on Facebook, on my Flickr and on Ryan’s Flickr.