Jenny

...with a dreamy, far-off look
and her nose stuck in a book
what a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle

the assignment was to create a portrait using the camera flash only as a filler. the background was to be fully lit, PLUS the subject in the foreground (you know, without that creepy washed out look?) and on top of THAT, the subject needed to be interacting/involved with something that describes them. insert jenny. plus books.the idea first came to me when i was on tumblr.com (i'm kind of addicted to that site. no joke). i tend to look up a specific keyword, and then just let the posts show me what they can come up with. i fell in love with some images of young women reading books. in fields, on their beds, in a chair, you name it. and once i recieved this assignment, i knew i wanted to replicate something of that genre. (insert reason #3,520,951 why my friends rock) jenny is a reader. quite the modern day belle with her love of reading if you ask me :). i told jenny my idea, and she LOVED it.and then came the preparation (or perspiration, depending how you look at it). finding a day, coordinating schedules, and what have you. well, today was that day! jenny works two jobs, and we were able to get together BETWEEN her shifts and bust this awesome session out! i had this vision of piles and piles of books all around her, so i had jenny bring HER books as well as i scrounged every bookshelf in the house practically for anything "novel" like. and then of course, this also involved me lugging the chair you see in these photos from my living room, across the driveway, and over in to the field next door... doing all this without tripping on the barbed wire. skilled, right? oh, and don't forget, it was like 90º outside today.but once jenny arrive, and we started shooting, things went so smoothly. we lugged books across my lawn, and then across the fence. sitting, standing, piling in a wagon, you name it. i asked jenny to do something, no questions, she did it. amazing, right? i feel like these images captured jenny and her downright LOVE of reading, as well as her sweet personality very well. and just to recap how amazing jenny is (in case you somehow forgot already) she's currently majoring in childhood education at CSUS to get her teaching credential and be one of the best elementary school teachers in the world :)fun fact: can you tell we used books from high school? it shows most in this last image. bottom left corner. apparently buzz lightyear, ariel and princess jasmine were all relevant in catcher in the rye. (yeah, that's my book...) you should see my huck finn book with the dinosaurs riding the boat. :)