A Picture Perfect Gift | atlanta portrait photographer

If you’ve been following me and my blog, you know I have a best friend who I’ve had since high school. We met in 1982 when I was in 10th grade and Alvia was in 9th. Funny thing is, I believe I met her through her then-boyfriend. At the time, he was in my grade and I had met him first and I must say, I had a slight crush on him. My memory is rather fuzzy, but I do believe I met them separately and one of them introduced me to the other. I would probably have to ask her to see if she remembers. Regardless, we became fast friends. She and two of her other friends invited me to be a member of their club. They had been friends for a while and I was the new kid at school. It was so nice to find some friends when coming to a new school. I hated being the new kid.

Fast forward to after college graduation, we became roommates. We had always talked about it and we brought it to fruition. That chapter in our lives could be a book all by itself, but I digress. Current day, she is a director for the Coca-Cola Foundation, is married and has two sons, one of whom is my godson. By the way, my son is her godson. You had to know that was coming. Anyway, I am so proud of her! She’s not only an awesome friend but a successful one too! Now on to the session. When her boys were young, I photographed her family portraits. The thing is, she didn’t have any portraits of just her. As we celebrated Christmas after Christmas, I realized that I couldn’t think of anything original to get her as a gift. After you get to a certain age, gifts aren’t really that important and you usually already have everything you want/need anyway. When I came to that conclusion I knew what I could give her…beautiful images of herself!

I think my best friend is beautiful on the inside and outside. She’s not too fond of photos of herself so, I felt my task was to show her what I see when I look at her. I believe she had fun during the session and that is definitely one of my goals. My other goal was to make sure she loved the images. After she viewed the images she gave me the best compliment I could get from her. “You did awesome. Even I like a lot of these.” You should have seen the smile on my face when I read that. Now that I’ve told you all of that, I can share images from the session. The images below are at the beginning of the session. Of course, we did a whole lot of talking prior to this, as well as during and after. Usually, it takes a moment or two to warm up in front of the camera but since we’ve known each other so long and so well, we didn’t have that issue. Since I didn’t want to inundate you with images I consciously made a concerted effort to minimize the number of images I showed. To be honest, it was really difficult for me to pick my ultimate favorites. Since she had three outfits, I chose three images from each.

Outfit number two. I love this outfit because the red looks so awesome on her. Also, the pants are super cute too! Even though she will swear that she’s not a model, I think she did wonderfully. It does help that she’s great at following directions and that she trusts me. Those two things are vital during a session. One thing about this outfit is that the pants were so long, oftentimes you couldn’t even see her shoes and from a distance, they looked like a skirt. That’s why in the first image below she’s holding her pants like that so you can see the separation. lol. The outtake of that pose was actually quite funny. Oh, I guess that was two things. Ah well…

And here is her final outfit. By the way, we had a phone consultation about what she should bring. She took pictures of the outfits and let me decide what to keep and what to discard. I was also made suggestions that we agreed on. And talk about coordinating her jewelry. I just love the red necklace she brought to go with the above images. She even switched watchbands for each outfit. Normally, I do consultations in person but over the phone can work too.

So, now you’ve finally seen my best friend. She’s very special to me and it means so much to me that she let me photograph her, just for her. I have lots of sisters but she’s the only sister I got to pick.