technical difficulties and tahoe pictures

I’ve had a few minor hosting issues lately – so if you’ve tried to send an email to greg@gregneilphoto.com over the last few weeks, it has probably not worked! I’ve got it working again now, but you’ll notice the blog web address is now with wordpress. I’ll try to get it sorted out soon. For now, you can follow the link on the gregneilphoto.com page, or bookmark this wordpress address.

A couple weeks ago I went to Lake Tahoe with my dad, brother, brother-in-law, and his kids. It was a bit of a guy’s adventure before my dad leaves for Albania for 3 years this week. We had a blast. Here’s a few photos from the trip.

One of the highlights for the kids was fishing. I’m not into fishing myself, but my brother brought his gear and taught the nephews a thing or two. They didn’t catch anything, but really loved it anyway.

We decided to take a hot air balloon ride over the lake – got up at 4AM and drove to the dock where we took off in this giant boat that launches the balloon from the middle of the lake. It’s the only spot in the word you can launch in a hot air balloon from a boat. The boat then motors around following the balloon and catching it when it comes down. They sent up these yellow balloons to test the wind before getting the big balloon ready. Apparently there’s 5 micro-climates up there to deal with. And apparently the weather was not cooperating – too windy. So the trip was scratched. Big bummer. Imagine the pictures I’d have come back with from up there! Anyway, it was still a fun little ride out on the lake.

 

nieces and nephews

I’ve been in Los Altos, California visiting my parents before they embark on a 3-year mission to Albania for the LDS church. All the family was here, and it was a great time for kid headshots! My nieces and nephews are the most fantastic, fun, intelligent, adorable little critters on the planet. I’ll be stoked if mine turn out half as well, when the time comes…

Grace, age 5 weeks:

Christopher, age 15 months:

Eliza (and Emily), age 18 months

Joshua, 3 years:

Andrew, 5 years:

Maren, 5 years:

Jack, 6 years:

We tried to get a group shot of my parents with all the grandkids… of course, they were getting tired and not all of them were cooperating, but we still got some fun shots out of it!

Thanks for taking pictures with me; I can’t wait to see you all again!

PeeWee Soccer

Visiting my sister’s family, I got to go to see Jack and Andrew’s last peewee soccer game of the season. They were awesome! Tough to get good shots in the middle of the day with the sun beating down from right above, but I came up with a couple.

Jack is the master of sports concentration. You know he’s concentrating when he’s sticking his tongue out. He’s always sticking his tongue out.

Andrew is fast. Very fast. He can outrun any other four year old, I’m sure of it. So I slowed down the shutter speed and panned with him while he was running to try to capture the motion. I like how this one turned out.

Eliza’s Birthday

Last October I got to go visit my niece Eliza for her 1st birthday, just a few days before Halloween. My sister, who has been getting into photography, pulled out her white paper backdrop and a couple studio strobes so we could get some cute 1st birthday pictures. We also managed a few halloween costume shots while we were at it. Eliza sure is adorable!

 

This one ended up being my sister’s favorite, and now hangs on the wall. She kept mentioning how she liked how you could see all her cute little toes. (I’m pretty sure she actually used the word “toesies”, but I digress…) I suppose when I’m a parent someday I’ll understand this fascination with baby toes. 😉

We decided to try and get a mother/daughter shot… why does Eliza look so happy?

…because there’s a floating hand about to feed her some frosting.

Jack was quite a scary skeleton…

Andrew was a very aggressive dinosaur. I’m sure he could tell you just what kind of dinosaur he was. He’s quite the expert.

Eliza was a witch. She didn’t like keeping the hat on, so we ended up just putting it beside her for the photo.

A little photoshop magic made Jack’s skeleton costume a bit spookier.

No photoshop on this one, my nephews just turned into terrifying floating-head ghouls. Temporarily, I think.

The Chamberlains go to the Zoo

In December, I got to spend a morning at the Los Angeles Zoo with the Chamberlain family taking pictures that would turn into Christmas presents for the grandparents. The kids were real troopers as we had to walk all the way to the back of the zoo to find a good shady location. I set up a fill flash on a stand through an umbrella off to the right to help lift the shadows. Some random kid thought it was the coolest thing ever. So cool, in fact, that he decided to run around it in circles really fast until he knocked it over. Needless to say i used my best adult voice to promptly dismiss him from the scene.

We ended up with some really nice pics of the family. After the formal shots, we got to run around the zoo checking out all the animals. The bears were particularly exciting that day. I think I want to visit the zoo again soon. Here’s my favorites from the session:

 

Thomas loved the map! I’m not sure we ever would have navigated the zoo properly without his expert guidance.

 

Ella was a wonderful model! Her cheerful and playful personality really shines through in these photos. 

I think this is a really sweet picture of Kath with her kids. 

This is my favorite of the group family shots. Yeah, thomas isn’t looking quite at the camera, but I can’t really blame him. There were BEARS just a few hundred yards from where he was sitting! BEARS!!

Thanks, Wade, for treating me to a zoo trip and letting me spend a morning photographing your family. Let’s go see bears again sometime.