Elk Grove HS Volleyball Team Pictures ...
We had a great time photographing the ladies of the Elk Grove Thundering Herd this afternoon.
We did their volleyball team pictures and had a blast. The girls are rambunctious and energetic and it was nice to see so many familiar faces. A number of them we've known for four years now and we're looking forward to doing their Senior portraits!
Here are a few images from today's shoot.
If you'd like to see more, you can check them out on our volleyball website.
Aedyn Rose comes to visit ...
Aedyn rose is the newest member of the Hall family - and what a sweet one she is!
She was born in May of 2006 and she lives with her mom and dad in a beautiful valley a number of hours from Sacramento, so we don't get to see her extremely often - but we always love it when we do.
Naturally, being born into a family of photographers, she is quite the subject and whenever we see her we can't help but pick up the camera.
Here is Aedyn when she was an itty bitty little gal, just a few weeks old ...
And now here she is, just a year an a half later, this slender, inquisitive little pixie who has been walking since she was only 9 months old ...
These images of Aedyn are a great example of our goal when photographing children - rather than putting them on a white background like some car in a showroom - we prefer a much more natural, casual, true to life approach. As children are often uncomfortable when strangers are about - particularly when they are in their home pointing a large camera at them - we often spend the first portion of a children's session simply being near them, communicating with them and building some familiarity and trust before we even take out the cameras. It's not uncommon to find us goofing around and playing with them as well - afterall, I don't think there's a member of our family that has ever truly grown up, we're just kids in big bodies!
Then, as we photograph, we include the child in the process - showing them images on the back of the camera so they can see what we are up to and engaging their interest.
The result is - we hope - relaxed, natural, beautiful images.
So what IS new at Micheal Hall Photography?
Well, this website for one thing! Welcome to the launch of our newest Micheal Hall Photography website. If I recall correctly, I believe this is our third complete re-design over the last five years. My goal with this site design is to provide a very easy to use interface with enough flexibility that I don't get so bored I have to re-design the whole thing in a year or so. :) I chose to skip a lot of the flashier interfaces and options out there and stick to a clean, simple interface that the vast majority of web-browsers out there should be able to do a good job rendering. We'll see if this pans out or not ... I've gotten good feedback from others that visit the other site of ours which uses a similar layout standard so I have high hopes for this one as well.
For those of you that do not already know us, we have long been know as one of the better volleyball photography studios around and we are actually sponsors of the Northern California Volleyball Association, as well as official photographrs for several of the Junior National Championship Qualifier tournaments. For six months of the year, we travel the country, intensively photographing junior girls club volleyball. We even have a website dedicated to our volleyball photography at: www.vbpics.com.
However, what most of our volleyball families haven't known about us is that we are also accomplished portrait and wedding photographers and - long before we began photographing volleyball - we would more often be found photographing a Senior portrait or fun family portrait.
For the last few years, we've been keeping quiet about these other services, as volleyball has simply kept us so busy we didn't have enough time to truly offer the high level of service we try to bring to everything we do. So, a few years back, we actually stopped offering wedding photography altogether and stopped mentioning and marketing our other services.
Over the past few years, we have been working very intensively to streamline our volleyball workflow to open our schedule up to other types of work. We enjoy volleyball a great deal, but photographing the same thing over and over and over again gets a bit wearing and we often long for another type of shoot to break things up a bit.
So, we turned our attention back to our portrait and wedding work and realized - for one thing - that our volleyball clients were a perfect audience for this sort of work as well! In fact, in December we are photographing our first wedding for a volleyball player we photographed as a teenager! We're very excited about this new facet of our photography and thrilled that she came back to us.
Additionally, many of the Seniors featured in our Senior Portrait section are actually volleyball players we met on the courts. We hope to continue this trend of photographing for families we know from the sport. It's a great deal of fun for us to get to know you off of the court.
Keep an eye on this space in the future - I hope to keep up updated with our most recent work and ideas.
If you would like us to photograph for you, we hope you will get in touch, we'd love to work with you!