Meet the Sielemans - another beautiful family compliments of Dr. Valone.  Jen is positively glowing while expecting her second child.  Luke (Mr. Sieleman) is very laid back with a great sense of humor and Payton is about as nice a boy as they come at 5 years old.  How do we get so lucky?

 We’re proud to again be sponsoring the Clive Festival Portrait Contest and excited to be unveiling the first of three new categories for this year’s contest.  BQ is our category for Boys ages 2-10.  Stay tuned for other new categories and full contest details on our website at www.photojeania.com/clivefest.  In the mean time, we hope you like the cover boys who helped us create this cool new theme for the contest.

Meet Heidi Boyd - wife, mother, nutrition professional and now model.   Heidi came into our lives as a referral from Dr. Ross Valone and we are very grateful.  We enjoyed bringing out how glamorous and glowing she looked for someone so late into her pregnancy.  We were also fortunate to get the rest of the family Mike (husband) and Ross (son) into the act for some special relationship portraits.

Heidi gave birth to an adorable six pound girl, Maisie (sounds like mazy), just a few days after our session.  Maisie, only three days old, laid comfortably on my lap during our preview session with Heidi and Mike this morning and made the cutest little faces while she slept.  Makes you wonder what they are thinking about at that age.  We look forward to our newborn portrait session next week and capturing Maise’s first year of life in fine art portraits.  Stay tuned for part II - Maisie’s first portrait session.

Kendra’s first senior portrait session in our studio was so spectacular, it deserved a sequal.  So we went to her home to see what she’s like in her own environment and discovered she’s just as wild and crazy at home as she is in the studio.  She is full of her own inspiration (e.g. “You know what? I think my bike matches my prom dress!”).  She still likes to tease us by saving her best poses for when she knows we’re not ready with the camera.  And she is just as eager to try our own crazy ideas like creating a little lounge in the middle of the street to hang out in her prom dress.  We’ll never get tired of photographing Kendra.  She makes our job a lot of fun.

Stopping traffic.

Kendra doing her best Laverne (or shirley).

Kendra’s family room provided an interesting Coca Cola setting and lighting.

When we decided to add sports image composites to our Senior Portrait product line, one of the first athletes I thought of as a subject was John Peters.  John was the Waukee Warriors Football Team’s starting quarterback last year as a Junior.  Having watched him from the sidelines for a number of games last year, I knew he played with intensity and if he brought his game face to the studio we would create some winning sports portraits.  Here is just some of what we came up in the studio. 

John is a great athlete and a super person and we wish him the best of success in football and other endevours his senior year.

This is the first of a six part series profiling the Price family of West Des Moines.  Kim is expecting her fourth child in May and is taking part in our “Baby’s First Year” program.  Our “Baby’s First Year” clients participate in a five portrait sessions over the course of approximately a year including a maternity session followed by a newborn session and children-family sessions at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months of the baby’s first year.  At the end of the program, our clients receive a beautiful album of images created throughout the year.

Kim wanted her children to be the focus of her maternity photography session so we approached it as more of a family affair.  While we couldn’t help ourselves from capturing Kim’s natural beauty and the glamorous side of maternity, we also focused on the children’s relationships with mom, their innocence and the expectation of things to come.  Finger painting mom’s belly, was a super fun way to wrap up the session and a wonderful opportunity to capture the joy of a family at play.  Great idea Kim.  We couldn’t ask for a more beautiful family and more genuine expressions of love and innocence.

Brianna is a very special young lady that seems to have it all - beauty, intelligence, athleticism, a great sense of humor, and an awesome wardrobe.  Brianna says she has never modeled, but we think she may have practiced a little.  She is a natural poser and has a lot of fun doing it.  After high school she plans to study medicine and is rumored to be quite a good golfer.  We’ll be keeping our eye on her.

Our senior portrait session was a lot of fun.  Brianna brought so many great outfits that we couldn’t help but spend a little extra time with her.  She has assured us there are plenty more where they came from so we look forward to an outdoor session with her when Spring finally arrives. 

One of the series of images from her session turned out so well we could could only narrow it down to about 80  favorites so we made a DVD slideshow out of them.   You can see it at http://www.photojeania.com/seniors/brianna.  We hope you enjoy it and please tell us what you think.

Between flower girls, maternity sessions, and pretty high school seniors, we manage to squeeze in some real men for some intense sports portraits.  Meet Paul Bird - a Des Moines area Ultimate Fighter who is undefeated as a pro.  Paul has traveled the world, including training in Thailand, in search of the perfect can of whoop ass and seems to have found it.  Paul is referred to in the ultimate fighting world as ”The Gingerbread Man” (as in you can’t catch me).  We hope the images help celebrate Paul’s success in the cage.  You can catch The Gingerbread Man in action at the Midwest Cage Championship Tournament at the BUCCS Arena on Hickman on April 25th.

A sports image composite from Paul’s session.  For inspiration I had Paul give me a few jabs to the head and this is what I saw.

Yesterday we had the opportunity to photograph dozens of beautiful children all dressed up for Easter at Glen Oaks Country Club.  In continuing with our flower girl theme, most of the girls wore flowers or pretty ribbons in their hair.  The flowers were provided by Danette Lynd of Fleur de Lynd.

A few of the images from the event are included here in this post.  We also have a beautiful video posted on our website arranged to an appropriately named Bobby Darin tune http://www.photojeania.com/glenoaks.  We hope you enjoy it.

 Any families interested in purchasing or viewing more of the images can contact our studio at 888-482-5735 and ask for Jeannie.