After finishing my 131 project I knew that I couldn't devote that much time to personal projects and take on new business too, but doing personal work was still very important to my professional development and for my enjoyment of photography. Rather than have just one big personal project running I decided to do a variety of things from projects like Home Grown in Central Vermont, to doing bits of street and landscape photography, or to doing portfolio shoots when I have an idea or concept or a subject that I'd like to collaborate with. This is the first of those portfolio shoots.

My idea with this shoot was to do a fashionable spring themed shoot with bursting apple or cherry blossoms filling much of the frame. Chenfang Yang who participated in my 131 project agreed to collaborate with me on this. I'm pretty sure that I am not very fashionable, but I think Chenfang is and based on our previous shoot I knew she would do a great job bringing ideas to the shoot and that she didn't need a lot of direction to come up with good poses.

The plan to have tons of blossoms as the backdrop did not pan out. The blossoms came late and didn't seem to last very long at all. We had scheduled a shoot right when the blossoms were reaching their peak, but there was a heavy rain that day and we had to re-schedule for the following week. By that time there were only a few blossoms left.

It was a little bit disappointing to not have the blossoms that I had pictured in my mind, but it was still a beautiful evening for a shoot and I knew it would be fun and with Chenfang it would be a good opportunity to make some beautiful pictures.

Chenfang proved to be a valuable model with this shoot not only for her beauty, but also for her ideas, because I didn't really develop the idea of this "fashionable spring blossom shoot" beyond that idea and with next to no blossoms I didn't have a strong sense of what I wanted to do. Normally that works perfectly for me - I like to do portrait sessions without any preconceived ideas, but here I was feeling a little unprepared. Chenfang was great at coming up with some ideas of her own and with accessing our shooting location options. We reviewed the pictures as we went and I think that helped in this case to get a more cohesive set of images.

Ultimately it was a good shoot with a fun subject and we were able to produce some images that I am pleased to put in my portfolio. Here are a few more images from the session...