regina holder photographer » artistic storytelling

Christopher is such a special little boy. He has grown so much from the slim little infant to a chubby fun almost crawling 9 month old. He is the joy of his family and so very loved. We did all of these shots with natural light in his room and throughout the house. I always stress relationship and how much it improves the wedding photos. It is the same for the children’s portraits. I have known Christopher for 8 out of his 9 months and see him regularly. He has some of the funniest expressions. I love the one when he is flinging the toy and has that wild look and the one where he looks like a frog. He often raises his eyebrows. I laughed at him so much editing these photos.

Click here to see Christopher’s 9 month sessions slideshow.

I spent 4 days in Atlanta this week at the LaCour Business of Storytelling workshop. It was a fabulous experience! I love these guys. LaCour consists of 2 husband and wife teams. They do some of the best lighting and post production work that I have seen. With photojournalism backgrounds, they understand the importance of telling the wedding story. Since I have a degree in photojournalism myself, it really makes sense to me what they are doing and I feel very inspired. Plus, it is so encouraging having photographers of their stature reaffirming that what I am doing is in the right direction. It is also important to realize my shortcomings, so that I can work on improving those areas. The LaCour signature lighting techniques are definitely something that I am working towards. They take an ordinary scene, without staging or interacting, and make it a work of art. Wedding photojournalism portrays what truly happened, without setting up scenarios or prompting the subjects, but the images don’t have to be boring or just documentary. Telling a story through the photos of the wedding, not just the nouns (who) and verbs (what) but also through the adjectives and details. LaCour has a worldview theory that you draw like people to you through your beliefs. They stress a family legacy approach to wedding photography.

Photographs have always been such an important part of my family. My grandmother loved the photos from her family from her grandparents through her childhood and through her children’s children. I now have many of those photos and they are so important to me. The first photo that I took was at age 7 of my grandfather and last year I had it enlarged and framed. My grandmother had lost a lot of her vision and when I made the photo of my grandfather big enough that she could see it, she cried so hard. The photo was taken the last Christmas that he was still with us.

Here are a few images from our lighting demo at the historic Biltmore ballroom in Atlanta. Mark and Erin of LaCour were married last year and did some modeling for us.

I have spent some time this weekend updating my website and adding new content. I am going to the LaCour 4 day workshop on tomorrow and they do a portfolio review session, so I wanted to overhaul the website before they saw it.

I have redone the portfolio galleries and restructured those to have 2 feature weddings. I shot Carla and Andy’s wedding in November in Georgia. I love their engagement shoot in Helen, GA last summer. I just shot Margaret and Josh’s wedding last month in Asheville. Again, they are some of my favorite engagement photos and I just love their wedding photos. I still have some work to do on the children’s portraits gallery and hope to actually launch a new children’s website in the next month. I had experimented with the brown background a few months ago and ended up switching back to white. Now that I have really embraced the purple and brown in my branding and marketing, I think I am ready for the brown background. If you haven’t been on the website in a while, check it out! www.reginaholder.com

As always, I am so excited at how many people actually read my blog and a bunch of you have subscribed either through Feedblitz, which will send you an email every time there is new content, or Feedburner that consolidates all the blogs you read into one listing daily. If you haven’t subscribed, give it try. I subscribe to several blogs myself.

Margaret and Josh had a beautiful wedding at one of my favorite locations, The Basilica of St. Lawrence, in downtown Asheville. The Bascilica is by far the most grand church in this area and is a true cathedral. Margaret was a gorgeous bride. She definitely understands the importance of a good makeup artist. The reception was held at On Broadway by Celine and Company caterers. On Broadway photographs so well and makes a great backdrop for photos. The food was awesome, too. I love Margaret and Josh’s photos so much I have made them a feature wedding on my new website updates.

Click here to see their slideshow.