Now, on to these beautiful springtime portraits by Virginia Photographer Jaime Scott!  To me these photos are sweet, sun-shiny perfection!  Thank you for sharing Jaime!!

-Sandra Coan

About Jaime, based in Virginia:  Website  |  Facebook  |  Contact

The post Jaime Scott Photography: Springtime Portraits of Two Little Girls appeared first on Little Bellows.

Luckily we have these gorgeous maternity photos by Virginia photographer Sera Petras to share!  I love a good maternity session, and these are about as good as they get.  Beautiful light, gorgeous couple, just perfection!  Thanks for sharing Sera!

-Sandra

About Sera:  based in Virginia  / website / contact / facebook

The post Sera Petras: Before the Babe appeared first on Little Bellows.

- Sandra

From Crystal,

“There is something special about entering into a home where a newborn lives. There is a peace that permeates. When I leave, I always feel blessed to have been there.

This little guy was two weeks old when I photographed him and his family in their home. Lovely home. Beautiful family. Glorious little babe.

I focused on mother and child and hoped to capture the tenderness and peacefulness passed between them. The last image was literally the last shot taken right before I left – when the session was technically over. It now signifies what I hope to capture at every newborn session – new love new hope new life.”

About Crystal: based in Virginia /website /contact / facebook

The post Crystal Hardin of Lily B Photography: Newborn at Home appeared first on Little Bellows.

One of the reasons that I’m so interested in these kinds of pictures is the nightly discussion I have with my husband, psychological neuroscientist Jim Coan, about what he calls Social Baseline Theory. The theory states that humans are predisposed to be around other people, and when we are separated from our social baseline (e.g., we are isolated), our brain thinks our body has more to do. (Can’t find that address while driving downtown? Doing it alone is even harder!) This is stressful–and stress isn’t good for us. If we’re chronically alone, we get sick more often, our wounds heal more slowly, we feel depressed–we are even at greater risk of dying!

When it comes to families, Social Baseline Theory takes the work done by John Bowlby and other great infant-parent attachment theorists, and applies a neuroscience framework to it. Bowlby says that infants and children need parents around to help regulate them, emotionally and physically, from the moment they are born. Social Baseline Theory further states that the reason for this needed regulation is that infants and small children have underdeveloped frontal cortices, the part of the brain that contributes to the kind of inhibition and emotional regulation that most mature humans use to recover from stress and avoid danger. Children need to “borrow” the frontal cortices of their caregivers while they work on developing their own brains.

Adults also get exhausted when we overwork our frontal cortex, and the more support we have through friends, loved ones, and especially our spouses, the easier it is to return to our social baseline.

However, children get disregulated much more easily, and require more frontal cortex energy from their caregivers to return to their own baseline. This is why children can sap so much of our energy, and many parents are left so super tired at the end of a day with our kids.

So, what is love? Love is many things, one of which is giving up part of your frontal cortex for someone else. Love is sacrificing for our loved ones, giving them our energy and brain/body regulation, when they need it most.

The pictures that follow show a family in various states of emotional regulation, from smiley hugs to tired hugs, to a few fleeting intimate moments. Then comes the very last shot: a tired toddler, gazing up at his parents, asking for help regulating near the end of a long photo shoot. It’s a small moment, but it’s what families are made of, and it’s Social Baseline Theory in action.

About Cat Thrasher, based in Charlottesville, Virginia: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Contact

Cat is a co-founder and regular contributor to Little Bellows. This post was originally featured on Cat’s blog, January 14th, 2013.

The post Cat Thrasher: The Science Behind Family, and How it Informs my Work appeared first on Little Bellows.

-Sandra

Jennifer is such a down to earth person, with exceptional talent and joy for what she does. Seeing what she is doing with film, from start to finish, is as inspiring as the warmth and truth of her pictures. the way she and her family live, the landscape of their lives is so pure and nostalgic in itself. these portraits are free and touching and wild and timeless. film is such a perfectly organic medium for the kind of life she’s sharing here. the closeness and expansiveness she captures are such beautiful ways to show his spirit, his size, his adventures.

- Amy Grace

From Jennifer:

” My little boy… on his land… doing what he does best. Scooters, sticks, lots of dirt and all with a mischievous look on his face.

Shot on 35mm with a combination of Portra 160 and 400.”

About Jennifer:  based in Virginia / website / contact / facebook

The post Jennifer Warthan of Warthan Farms Photography: A Boy On His Farm appeared first on Little Bellows.

These photos are just perfection! The light is gorgeous, the angles and poses are spot on, but I think that what  I love most about these images is the color.  It’s so soft, almost pastely, and it feels like a newborn baby.  Outstanding.

-Sandra Coan

From Sera:

“Sweet Baby Everly has come into our lives. She is just as precious as can be. One week after she was born I got to spend almost an entire day with her and her Mama. It’s not everyday a photographer is lucky enough to see this transformation. I’ve been there since she was in her Mama’s belly, to witnessing her birth and now being a welcome friend their home. I’m a lucky girl. ”

About Sera:  based in Virginia  / website / contact / facebook

The post Sera Petras: Baby Everly | One Week Old appeared first on Little Bellows.

DeAnna’s work captures what I love so much about photography, namely its ability to transport me to a different world, a world that’s alltogether beautiful, quirky, and cinematic.

When I return from that world, I’m a more joyful person. Feasting on a ton of eye candy will do that do you.

Enjoy her images below and be sure to check out her Instagram feed @deannamcasland, as well as her big camera work on her website.

Happy almost weekend y’all,

Christina

The post Christina Mallet on Instagram: DeAnna McCasland @deannamccasland. Part 2, in Color. appeared first on Little Bellows.

Case in point, @deannamccasland  ‘s images below, coming to us from Virginia.

This post features all black and white, as you can see, but I want to let you know that DeAnna did not just send me fab black and white. She also sent me color, really off the charts color.

With a collection of images so solid, I feared running a color combo would hurt your eyeballs, from rad.

And so, I’ve decided to run @deannamccasland ‘s images on two separate weeks. I think you’ll be happy about that.

Please visit her IG feed and also check out her big camera portfolio!

Have a super-duper Thursday!

XO,

Christina

The post Christina Mallet on Instagram: Featuring DeAnna McCasland – @deannamccasland appeared first on Little Bellows.

There’s nothing perfect about the photograph above. In fact, there was not one perfect picture among the three rolls of film that I shot on this family outing last month. But this one emerged as my favorite shot. Here’s why I did not disregard it in my grand cull of the day’s pictures, and why it’s so important to me:

First, Jim looks incredibly handsome here, and his face is the first place that my eye goes when I look at the shot. I know that he’s smiling for the camera, but you can also tell that he’s having a genuinely fun time, because of the authenticity of his smile and ease of his gaze. He loves to be out and about with Lulu, and he’s always in the current moment during outings like this one. His face says that to me, here: that he’s all-present, not thinking about work or money or life stress. All he’s thinking about is Lulu on his shoulders, the running river behind him, the sun-filled landscape, and the wind in his hair.

Then, my eye goes straight to Lulu’s turned head. While some might delete  the picture during a grand edit due to this head-turn, that’s actually the moment that my love for the picture is solidified: it’s a true Lulu moment. Lulu loves to be stimulated (and distracted) by her environment. She likes to discover new things and meet new people and fall in love with things around her. We had just arrived at the park in the shot, and she was enthralled with the sight of it: children playing frisbee, birds chirping, the Rivanna flowing fast behind her – there was so much to look at and encounter!

And then, as if to accentuate the active mind and short attention span of an energetic toddler, the wind picked up her hair and smothered her face with it, replacing our view of her face with a view of her little ear, in a moment of chaos right before I clicked the shutter. That burst of wind adds much drama to her pose and emphasizes the turn of her attention and fascination with all things around her.

Overall, the picture turned into a “posed candid,” because even though I posed them, something happened, out of my control, that made the picture even better. With the ease at which digital photography allows us to capture more and more perfectly framed pictures, the imperfect ones begin to shine through to me the most. At the very least, a shot needs to have a unique element to be remembered in our minds. Or, as Alexander Liberman stated in the forward to Passage:

“Photography needs to be dramatized more than any other medium. The world is inundated with images that seem to blur gray in our minds. For a picture to strike memory, it has to have an unusual unique, inherent secret – a visual signature.”

This shot has that inherent secret, that visual signature: the dramatic turn of Lulu’s attention. It’s important to keep these pictures in our archives, because no photographer can plan these tiny moments of authenticity, making the few we do get priceless pieces of family art!

About Cat Thrasher, based in Charlottesville, Virginia: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Contact

Cat is a co-founder and regular contributor to Little Bellows. This post was originally featured on Cat’s blog, March 3rd, 2013.

The post Cat Thrasher: Jim + Lulu + The Importance of Imperfect Snapshots appeared first on Little Bellows.

This is a picture of my little Lulu, about 22 months old, exploring a downed, hollow, old-growth Virginia tree that once stood high at Monticello. The tree curves and bends, the perfect setup to play  hide-and-seek with Papa Bear, Jim. This shot was taken as she rapidly shimmied up one slope of the tree and rounded the corner, stopping suddenly when she spotted Papa.

The photograph is of Lulu at a moment of excitement and discovery. Her eyes are wide, her face waiting to receive and accept what is in front of her. She is unaware of the mess of her hair, or her chubby hands touching the tree surface, but we see these things. The light illuminates her face upon the turn of the corner, a symbol of the beckoning of things that are to come – in this tree, and in her life. Things she is discovering and has yet to discover. Wonderful, fascinating, incredible things.

Right after I got the film back with this picture, I read a critique of Irving Penn, with this sentence:

“The photograph, like the still life, is always close to death. It builds monuments out of perishability and our mortaility, and it is always one of the ways we fend off death.” -Jan-Erik Lundstrom, Penn

The quote got my attention because of the seemingly dark message. In slight contrast, I’ve always thought of family portraiture as a celebration of life, as freezing moments in time that we want to revisit, that we never want to forget. But this is an optimitists view, and it ignores the small, abstract pain that I get in my head and chest when I look at a picture like Lulu Tree. The picture actually causes me a bit of pain. I’ve always thought of that feeling, the tinge you get at the intersection of pain and joy,  as the same thing that causes you to cry at a wedding, or at other moments of extreme emotion. But the quote above puts a more concrete spin on that feeling: it’s about avoiding death. It’s existential.

Maybe, as Lulu turns her head around the corner of the tree trunk, in her moment of discovery, the sweetness and beauty of it hit me so powerfully that I hurt at the thought of it passing. Or maybe it is so far away from death itself, that I am moved by the polarity: just as we cry at the moment when a loved one passes, we weep at the moment when they are at peak growth.

About Cat Thrasher: Based in Charlottesville, VA. Website | Facebook | Blog | Contact

The post Cat Thrasher Photography: “Lulu Tree” | A Mother’s View of Her Child’s Portrait appeared first on Little Bellows.