If you follow my blog, you’d know that my aim this year is to stretch myself with my photography.  So, with that in mind, I’ve signed up for an online advanced Lifestyle photography class for the next month.  It’s being run by Brooke Snow in the US, and a week into the course I’m loving the content.  Not only is her content about the topic for the week, but she’s added a whole host of things to help run a photography business.  It’s always fantastic to learn from other successful photographers.

Anyhoo, the assignments have to be posted on our blogs, and this post is my first submission .  The aim of this week was to do a photoshoot in a location that you’d never used before, and to create a shot list and really work the location.

Because I didn’t have a portrait shoot booked for the weekend, I used my boys as this week’s subjects (Nicole, your shoot on Sunday afternoon will be including my topic for the next week’s assignment ).

As for the location, I chose a narrow strip of veld (greenbelt) that’s a few blocks away from our house.  We walk the dogs along the pathways, and I’ve been dying to have a photoshoot there in the late afternoon with the sun in the long grasses.  Thankfully the boys were keen (I’ve given them a bit of a posing break in the last few weeks), and we stopped there on the way home this evening.

We’ve had a LOT of rain lately, and I didn’t realise how marshy the land was.  The municipality had cut the grass along the river so that residents can walk their dogs easily, but thankfully they haven’t cut the rest of the long grass yet.  My plan was to get the kids into the long grass and take photos of them with the sun glinting off the tips of the grasses.  That didn’t work all that well because it was quite cloudy.  And I was going to get them to lie in the grass… which they refused to do because the ground was actually very wet.  So instead I had to make other plans. With the grass under the trees being so short for a change, I discovered how gorgeous the line of willow trees was, and used that.  Then Connor got bored and sat on a log… and I snapped away.  Then they found some dandelions and those are always fun

I’m only allowed to choose 3 images though… so here are my favourites…

* My Every Day project is my 2012 year-long project reflecting my life and things around me