Pieces of the Picture

Allow us to introduce ourselves. My name is Tommy Peterson and beautiful bride is Holly with the same last name. That cute little boy between us is Moses or as we like to call him Mo.

We have been involved in professional portrait photography for almost ten years and have photographed literally hundreds of thousands of people throughout the decade. We have both worked in the past for a large national portrait photography company that taught us many things, but it primarily taught us the importance of customer service and how to interact with people of every age, personality, race, religion, etc. It also gave us the drive to explore all the aspects of photography, that we were not experiencing working for this company, on our own.

I have found many websites and blogs that are photography based. They normally fall within four categories.

The first is for gear heads or I have recently heard used, camera fondlers. They may discuss the newest camera, lens or accessory. If you are of this persuasion, this website is certainly not for you. In fact, I would venture to say that most fall into this genre. And while these types of sites are great and very helpful, this is not our purpose nor do we intend to post content about it here.

The second is what I like to term as “artspeak”. It is gibberish that only the person saying it understands. It is a prideful attempt to interpret everything that is art as some immense meaningful statement. For example, a certain photograph of seagulls diving into the ocean means you were abused as a child. Or a solid black photo, with one speck of white somehow represents that the bleak outlook the artist has on his own life. Let’s just say, this is definitely not what we will be practicing here.

The third is those that promote their own photography business. We have one of those as well. There’s nothing wrong with this if you plan on being in business for yourself. In fact, we will be discussing the importance of this in a later post. But again, this is not what this blog is about.

The fourth is very common as well and that is those sites that teach you “how to”. They teach you “how to” take good photos of landscapes or teach you “how to” shoot in low light situations. They may show you “how to” use photoshop to crop or sharpen or “how to” use the rule of thirds to compose a great photo of a barn. While we will discuss these topics or should I say, these types of topics briefly and occasionally, they will certainly not be the main focus of our blog.

We decided that while nature, landscape, journalism, fashion, fine art photography, etc. are often times the types of photography that are most spoken about on the web, the content you find least on the web is practical, helpful advice on photographing families. When we say families, we are referring to everything that that encompasses, from babies, to children, to families, to seniors, to pets, to weddings, to maternity, to labor & delivery photography and back around again. Everything that revolves around the basic unit of the family. The majority of photographers that make their living on taking pictures do so through these types of photography. So, we decided we had enough knowledge, experience and practical advice that we should start sharing with the world.

Maybe you’re asking yourself, “What is this blog all about?”  Well, we will be discussing content that ranges from how to get a child to smile for a portrait, to how to advertise to seniors for senior portraits, to good poses for families with pets and much, much more. Basically, anything and everything that has to do with “family” centered photography. Welcome to our World of Photography!