Photos By: Harmony Motter
So I first photographed Evie in 1995, shortly after her birth. The photo on the left is of Evie's mom, Shannon holding her in a field near their home. Evie is soon to turn 17 and is approaching her senior year of high school. When I recently shot these pictures of her, I couldn't help but think of that tiny baby that I photographed almost 20 years ago.
Photos By: Harmony Motter
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Recently I began thinking of different things I could do with my photos. I'm really--make the picture and move on person, but.... maybe there should be something beyond the taking and posting to a website. Client work is great because it forces the issue of making prints etc... for their walls. But what about the stuff I do that is just purely for the love and need of making images? Someone mentioned note cards and I began thinking of small collections of these cards--like 6 different pictures in a pack of 12 notecards with envelopes. That sorta thing. I thought this sounded like a good idea right up to the moment I observed a whole bleacher full of people all looking into their laps and thumb typing messages on their phones. It made me wonder if anyone even uses note cards anymore. So I'm not sure. I might try a limited edition to see or just make short run limited edition prints and see how that goes. But I am beginning to think that maybe if I'm going to do anything with this work, I might need to hire a business/marketing manager!!!!!! I like the making end--but trying to sell and market---well that takes away from the making. I made this photo in the wee hours of this morning in my kitchen using nothing but a flashlight the iphone app hipstamatic---the lens and film choice of Lucifer 1v lens and blanko film really added warmth to the red flashlight light and the dark warm toned paneling in the kitchen and transformed the white and orangey daffodil into a very unified color scheme. The tough part was getting the flashlight just right to not blow out the highlights and then staying still enough at 1:30 in the morning with the phone and a slow shutterspeed. I've never photographed flowers more than I have this year. Photograph by Richard Sayer
I recently photographed Cortney Coppock's senior portraits. Cortney is a student at Conneaut Valley High School. She is pursuing her education is cosmetology and I think very much looks forward to graduation. Prior to meeting with Cortney, I was driving around Meadville when I spotted these vines crawling up a wall in an alleyway. I thought...Perfect! They are sweet and simple and I think it worked.
SayerMotter Photo By: Harmony Motter This is Riley! He is my three year-old Cockatiel. I adopted him a year ago. He used to live with an elderly woman who passed away and he was in need of a home. In the past year, I have learned so much about his personality. He loves white rice, spaghetti noodles and graham crackers. He enjoys hanging out in the bathroom underneath the shower curtain. He sings beautiful songs and he had the prettiest brown eyes. I hope to enjoy many more years with Rye.
IPhone Photo By: Harmony Motter We've been hearing back from people that they voted for us in the Meadville Tribune Reader's Choice awards and we wanted to thank you all for taking the time to fill out the forms and get them to the Tribune. I've also been asked if voting can be done online and the answer is no. It has to be a ballot from the paper. Thanks again for the votes and hopefully we'll be continuing to grow and take more and more photos in the coming years! I we do love doing what we do!
http://meadvilletribune.com/local/x1527123566/Wrapped-in-Prayer
The link abouve will take you to an audio slideshow and a story I did in 2011 about Prayer Shawls and some local people who distribute them and who have been touched by them. This story was presented online in many forms and on a few different sites. The audio slideshow marries words with pictures and the voices of the people involved here locally. Recently it was recognized by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association with a second place in the Online Special Project category of the Keystone Press Awards. Awards are nice to receive for sure. The great benefit is that the story reaches more people and gets to have a second life as we pat ourselves on the back and share the story all over again. And even though this story was completed and released over a year ago, the project continues on. Search prayer shawls and I'm sure you'll find somewhere in your area that there is a group dedicating their time to making and getting the people in need of the comfort the shawl can provide. Here in Meadville, its as simple as contacting the Yolanda Barco Oncology Institute and asking for Sue. She has passed out hundreds of shawls. Please check out the story and the audio slideshow! As you might have guessed, Harmony and I pour our hearts into our work. Obviously some days we really seem to get everything we put into our craft back out with images we're proud of and other days we're not as happy with our work. The key to it...this being a person or persons in the creative field...is that we need to keep pushing our creative abilities to see where we can go next. This is incredibly important to us. We don't want to be the photographer who has produced the same thing for 40 years. We want people to trust us to deliver, but our delivery has to come from a growth through experimentation and not just a consistency of the 'look' that is us. Everytime I make a photograph I'm thinking...I want to make 'my' photograph....something that when people look at it they know its one I took, but not because it is the same as one I've taken before, but because it has the same quality and exploration of ones I've taken before. Harmony and I work really hard at making authentic and original works for our clients and for ourselves. We believe if we can't please our own creative desires...what chance do we have of pleasing our clients. A late night photograph of a flower that has passed its brilliance is just a small thing we do to keep our desire of learning more about our craft fresh and alive. We're always interested in making new pictures and seeing what makes a photograph interesting to us and our clients and friends! Photogr
When you play around with an idea, you never know 100% what will end up sticking in the end. We wanted to try many things just to see if what was originally thought of....might be expanded upon. And this is what makes this creative business so much fun. We play and play and play(Oh we call it work and it is work and often it exhausts us, but what I love about the creative field is that exhaustion doesn't usually stop us from working even more and even harder.) Here are a few of the images we made for Rosanne's new blog which can be found at Chewthefacts.com check it out. Click any of the pictures to enlarge.
I've photographed local actress Maribeth McCarthy now several times and each time is great fun. She loves to play, she loves to pose, she loves to make grand gestures and.....she is able to start out talking and finish the sentence in full song. She possesses peering eyes and I'm not sure a bad photograph is possible. She is getting ready for a play in which she plays Siamese twins with her actual twin sister Ellie. It'll open in a week or so at the Meadville Community Theatre. This was one of those Maribeth being Maribeth after she noticed I was pointing my camera at her in the mirror as she was on her cell phone before rehearsal. It was an outtake, but her eyes were stunning in it so I had to save it and find a place to post it. So if you see Maribeth out in public remember she'll likely break into song and most assuredly call you darling! Photograph by Richard Sayer.
Most of the time I use the Hipstamatic app when I make cell phone photos. Today I wanted to use my fisheye attachable lens to do an assignment to see if I could make a boring assignment possibly come alive a little. During this I snapped a quick shot of some folks walking across the closed Mead Ave. bridge. I admit it was a rushed photo because I saw it late and tried to run into position in time, but was late for what I thought would be neat with the person more in the foreground. This lens will get more play and I hope to learn how to use it better and apply it to some meat affects for our clients. With wedding season coming I'm expecting this to be a pretty neat little tool to use! Photograph by Richard Sayer.
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