Sara Michele Photography » portraits

A double engagement photo session at the botanical gardens!

Sara Michele — Mon, 02 May 2011 17:42:13 +0000

Felisha, Keri, AJ and Richard are all friends. Keri and Richard are getting married May 27th and Felisha and AJ will be tying the knot Oct. 1st. Platinum Mix is providing the photographers for both couples, and so we set-up a double engagement session. Myself and Jesse Green headed out to Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor for the shoot. Felisha and AJ are having their wedding ceremony there, and if you’re looking for a ceremony location, I’d highly recommend it. Its a beautiful spot which really provides for endless photo opportunities. On to the photographs.

This first set is Felisha and AJ and all shot by Jesse David Green –>

The next set is Richard and Keri photographed by Sara Michele (me!)

[/caption]

Pinky swear, I did not tell Richard to do this…all his idea.

Jesse and I finished the session off with a few group portraits…

josephine @ 2 months

Sara Michele — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:15:30 +0000

As much as I love photographing events, I’ve set a goal for myself to become a better portrait photographer. I’m gonna master those darn studio lights and get awesome at this. So thinking that babies would probably be easiest, I volunteered my services to my friend Robin who’s got a brand new baby in the family she claimed was very cute. Robin was right – baby Josephine is very cute. Sara was wrong – photographing babies is not as easy as it looks. But. I do like babies, and I do like making pictures, so now I just need a few more cute babies to practice on….

Special thanks to Josephine’s Mom, Christine, for letting me photograph her daughter. Here are a few of the results:

Fishin’, Kissin’ and Rock n’ Roll

Sara Michele — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:33:14 +0000

So I’ve been trying this new thing where I pick a Sunday and a location and then schedule as many portrait sessions as possible. I think this will be more convenient for many of my clients who are located all over the place. So Sunday April 11th I was in Downtown Chicago. This past Sunday, April 18th, I was far east-side Metro Detroit (Shelby Township/Chesterfield/Etc). Seems to be working well so far.

This past Sunday, started out with some fishing with Brandi and Sean at Stoney Creek Metro Park. Sean is an avid fisherman, Brandi likes to hang out by the lake. It works well for them. We actually hadn’t planned to fish during the photo session, Sean just wanted to sneak in some fishing before I showed up to take pictures. But I really like to try and incorporate my clients hobbies and interests into their photos. I feel like it personalizes them alot more than the basic “look over here and smile” stuff (BORING!). So. They broke out the tackle box and I proceeded to click away…

Sean even caught a fish!

I’ve always wanted to do one of these photo animations. Here is my first try at one. You have to click on it to make it work:

[click on image]

A few more from Brandi and Sean’s engagement photo session ->

Next comes the Rock n’ Roll part. I switched locations to a bar called New York New York in Chesterfield Township, Michigan where I met Nichole and Jason. Jason is a bass player in a band called Dirty Whiskey. I stalked him on Myspace after their session so I could check out their music – good hardcore rock stuff! Jason proposed to Nichole on stage during a gig here, so it made for the perfect spot for their photo session. Following is a few of the resulting photographs. As a side note, this is my first time working with a video light for pictures. I couldn’t really use a traditional flash in this location because it was wicked dark, and there wasn’t really anything to bounce my flash off of and I totally forgot to bring some kind of diffuser or something. Plus, I kinda wanted to experiment with using the video light. After viewing the photos, I think this is going to be amazing if I take the video light OFF the camera and have an assistant hold it or something, but it did work to get the job done.

We played around on the stage for a bit, but then moved to the neighboring bowling alley to get a couple in a little better lit area:

look at all the pretty pictures…

Sara Michele — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:04:23 +0000

I dig the blog method of displaying my work, but truthfully I get a little jealous when I see other photogs super flashy portfolio sites. So I decided I needed one too. I still need to actually work on the home page, and whatever other pages, but I did get three portfolios put together for people interested in viewing a variety of my work. The hardest part was narrowing down the images to include. Initially I had over 1,000 wedding favorites, getting that down to a favorite 75 was challenging. Choose one of the links below to view my new portfolios!

A few of my wedding photo favorites

Faves from engagement sessions

A collection of other stuff I like to shoot. Mostly models and cars. A few from the Final Four events I did too that bring back fond memories for me