gwyneth colleen photography » portsmouth, nh wedding photographer

so…today’s client told me she loves my blog.

*guilt, guilt, guilt*

a lot has happened this month.  i had tomme hilton and january newbanks fly in to shoot weddings with me…and oh, monday was my birthday.  my best friend came up (with her baby and almost-3-year-old-who-likes-to-sleep-in-boxes-when-she-visits)

she gave me the most beautiful fascinator for my birthday.  (please excuse the mobile upload picture.)

(brides looking for something special for your wedding day hair-do…check out that link.  lo boheme’s etsy store has some GORGEOUS bridal fascinators.  i covet…most of them.)

today i had a shoot on a garlic farm!  the wonderful allison and jon gave me some of their (very own, handmade) garlic powder and some of the largest non-elephant garlic you’ll ever see.  (pictured behind the garlic are some of the apples i picked for my day-after-my-birthday traditional apple-picking outing.  if you live in the northeast and have never tried macouns…hurry up and rectify that!  best apples EVAR.)

and, for allison, my loyal blog-reader and guilt-inducer…here are a couple teasers from today!

a few months ago, a friend of my good friends wanted to do something special for her fiance.  he calls her his pinup girl, so doing a sweet and sexy retro-styled shoot was the perfect solution!

j’s wedding was a few weeks ago, so i can finally share some of these with you!

these images were, of course, shared with permission and do not include some of the ones that i’m sure her now-husband likes the most. 

please contact me if you’re interested in a pin-up session!  this was one of the most fun sessions i’ve ever done, and i’d love to do lots more!

joanna and i met in september of 2003 when my friend luke showed up at his flat with a poor, homeless american girl.  i’d just spent 3 weeks up north cleaning a backpackers and living in a campervan…and i was over it.  sure that’s what a real, cool, hippy backpacker does, but…um, it didn’t actually PAY, and i wanted to earn some money.

there were 5 people living in the weird old house…luke, joanna, amy, whatshisface–the lanky vegetarian from up north who was incongruously a total rugger-head (that is, rugby enthusiast), and laura (joanna’s sister.)  laura enthusiastically suggested, “share my room!”  (her room was quite large and had this lofted cupboard thing that she slept in…so there was plenty of room to throw a mattress in the corner for me.

eventually luke shifted out, laura left, other people moved in, but i stayed in that room sleeping on the mattress in the corner.

a couple years later, in 2005, joanna came to north america for a big inspiration tour…she wanted to see the artistic expression, street art, graphic design happening in the cities.  we met up and went on a massive road trip…slept on various friends couches, in a dodgy hostel in montreal, in the car in toronto after a blue jay’s game, walked around the shores of lake michigan, swung by niagara falls…it was a great trip.

she’s now co-launched her own design/art/media company called we love inc and is working her little tail off, because they’re crazy talented and busy…but i insisted that we needed to take a day and have some photo fun.  and oh DID we.  we took turns styling one another and driving around the city to shoot.  (and of course, we couldn’t do something like that without incident…we had to swap the rental car halfway through because it was protesting driving up hills.  that’s like getting a car that can’t go up hills in san francisco.  just not going to work.)  without further ado…the beautiful joanna.

it was SUCH a fun shoot…if you’d like to see any of the others, you can view the gallery here.  (and, of course, when i’ve got more than 2 teasers of the ones she took of me…you’ll get to see ‘em!  but, i’ll leave you with:  peacock feather, dead body in graffiti-d trash den, gwyn hepburn in roman holiday…)