I had the pleasure of working with Jewell Whitmer as she starts the process of launching her Women’s Health Integrative & Functional Medicine Practice! Jewell is a certified nurse midwife and herbalist who has been practicing for 12 years. She has delivered a ton of babies and helped women through many births. Now she’s excited to take what she knows and begin to focus on women’s health and empowerment, and I’m so excited to help her with that process! She contacted me to take new branding photos and headshots for her, and together we had a blast shooting in an incredible house with a beautiful property (and fun music always helps a session along too!). Jewell actually used to develop her own photographs in a darkroom in her childhood home, so she knows a lot about photography and what she was looking for in her branding photos, and I was excited to work with another creative woman. Also, I have to say, I love photographing food and am pretty excited whenever anyone asks me. AND I got to photograph tea this time as well, which is also great fun. And Jewell knows a lot about teas. If you want to follow her in her new business journey and become her client, you can find her and her knowledge of teas and food on Instagram here.
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: in-home lifestyle family shoots are my absolute favorite. But, they’re especially my favorite when they involve breakfast. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because making a special breakfast has always signified to me that it’s the weekend because that’s when you have time to actually make sausage and french toast and all that other yummy stuff. So I enjoy hanging out at other peoples’ houses on Saturday mornings while they make breakfast and wear their pajamas – this is comfortable and fun for me. And sometimes it’s fun and comfortable for the kids too, particularly when their names are Andrew and their favorite activity in the whole world is being photographed.
So here we have Allison and Nathaniel, two very intelligent people with lots of incredibly fun hobbies (Allison used to make balloon animals for parties!) who have interesting jobs and a good sense of humor (plus a killer selection of vintage My Little Ponies). And we have Samuel, the very cute baby who we occasionally forced into a cowboy hat because he was wearing a bandana bib and it just felt right. And last, but certainly not least, we have Andrew, toddler extraordinaire, who immediately smiled at me when I walked in the door like he knew that I was another shot at the big time for his inevitable career in show business. Then he continued smiling directly at me throughout the entire 1.5 hours I was there. He was *this close* to winking at me pretty much all the time. He is a total ham and hilarious. When he’s not waiting for his career to take off, he enjoys walking like a penguin, working in his garden, making OJ, cracking eggs for french toast, and helping his Grandma June play the piano when she visits. I immensely enjoyed hanging out with this crew on a weekend morning.
It’s a small world out there, but I never stop getting a kick out of meeting people from southwestern PA. Julie and Matt are from a small town a little south of Johnstown, where I spent a semester at UPJ. They went to colleges in the area that I’m familiar with, and we all were able to equally lament about scraping the ice from our cars in the morning (which, cruelly enough, Geoff and I had to do this morning in North Carolina before we went to the gym). Matt was also an education major (southwestern PA produces a lot of stellar teachers) and he likewise moved south to teach down here. Julie and Matt, in addition to having this eerily similar background to me, also have two cats and enjoy staying at home (SAME). Their cats’ names are Binx and Drogo and there was a lot of debate at the shoot as to who is the better behaved cat. They’ve been living down in NC for 4 years and are getting married up in PA next summer. And this PA girl is very happy for these fellow PA folks, and so glad I got to inject a little bit of “yinz” into their engagement session in Durham. ;)
