I love "my" Carbondale families: the folks I've gotten to know over the years of shooting up there. One such family is the Carpenters. Kallie is a yoga and fitness instructor and she needed some new professional yoga photos so we decided to add on some fun summer family photos while we were there. We met at the River Valley Ranch pool and made use of their studio for some of Kallie's yoga shots. One of the big challenges of my style of photography (natural light, on-location) is that you never know what surprises are in store when you arrive for a shoot. The challenge in this case was mirrors, mirrors everywhere and where there weren't mirrors there were windows. Windows can be good and bad. They give us light (yay!) but also give us big rectangles in the background (boo). I often shoot in front of windows, but particularly for yoga shots, where you want emphasis on body lines, having competing lines in the background can be problematic. There was wonderful light but also a) light glaring in the mirrors b) me in the photos and c) limited shooting angles. As it turned out the light was lovely, the reflected light in the mirrors and floor added softness, and I somehow managed to keep myself (or crop myself!) out of the images. (You can see some of my other yoga photos here.) We did some shots of Don playing with Corbin and Quinn in the pool, I was impressed with how high he could throw those kids in the air. When it started getting dark we decided to play around with sparklers. Lesson learned: don't buy the cheap sparklers for photography. They burned out in 20 seconds. Fortunately my sister in law must've had a premonition about the sparklers and suggested I take some glow sticks with me. They worked great! Three glow sticks and a cell phone later, we got some fun shots in the dark. Shortly after the shoot I was preparing a flyer for headshot sessions and needed something special. I trolled Kallie's session and used one of her new headshots before she ever saw her own pictures. Love you guys, thanks for being so awesome! Update: Kallie just published her website - check it out! www.kalliecarpenter.com