Breaking in the Springs

Over Spring Break, I went on a little road trip up to Eureka Springs with my family. (Get it breaking in the springs haha get it) (*boos ensue from back of the room*)
This is a long time family favorite vacation spot that we've gone to since I was about three or four. If you've never been, Eureka Springs is in Arkansas in the Ozark Mountains, and is a nice, naturesque getaway with a great downtown area with lots of cool little shops and cafes.

On the way, we stopped in Fayetteville to hit up Dickson Street Book Shop. (Which may have actually been my favorite stop on the whole trip.) 

This is another family favorite we have frequented over the years, particularly my dad (pictured below). The place is just PACKED full of used and discontinued books. Every nook and cranny of the building is filled with books, which is a book-lover like me's dream. I stumbled on Annie Leibovitz's photojournal Pilgrimage (score) and a set of old prints from the mid-1900's, including an old photo of Cary Grant from '32, and my favorite, an old shot of Ansel Adams from the '50s. I think collectively we left with three huge paper bags from here,

 After leaving Fayetteville and grabbing some concretes from Shakes (double score), we were back on the road to Eureka. Since we got there on a Sunday, much of the downtown area was closed down by the time we got there, but we managed to find a small Mexican restaurant open for dinner.

The next day we started exploring the town more. We started at Onyx Cave, which is a cool little cave a little ways outside of town that has guided tours. Ignore the crappy flash photos, it was really dark down there. As one would expect from a cave. I picked up a cool little amethyst wind chime while I was here.

After the cave we went to Promised Land zoo, which is a cool little petting/drive-thru zoo a couple miles outside of town. We discovered this last spring break, and it was so fun we couldn't miss it again. I think I had more fun than all of the children there combined. I mean, look at this freakin alpaca.

                                                                         IT'S FACE.

We spent the next couple of days perusing main street, exploring it's many local shops, and eating ungodly amounts of sushi. Like, three meals in two days ungodly. 
It was nice to have a little break from everything and just have a week to relax, take photos for myself, and read.

A couple more because the sky was SO BLUE. Okay bye.

A Love for Low Lighting

Hello all! I have more photos to share today:)
My most recent assignment in photo lighting class was High Key and Low Key photos in the studio.
High key are well lit, bright images with minimal shadows, while low key are low lit, darker with more shadows. The assignment was supposed to be about half of each, but I ended up loving the low key so much more that they're nearly all low key...woops.
Anyway, here are some of my fave low key shots from the shoot!
(If anyone's interested I'll include some details of how these were shot below.)

Models: Kailye Anderson and Jessi Chapman

For any other photographers or techies that are interested, I'll share a little about my lighting setup on these. This dramatic, low-lit effect is pretty easy to achieve in the studio because, as you can guess, you don't need a lot of light. Our set up was one 800 watt light on a stand with an aluminum cone to direct the light at the subject. We placed it at about a 45 degree angle in front of the subjects to create some cool shadows. On some we also used a full body softbox on the very lowest light setting on the opposite side of the subject if the shadows were too harsh.
Enjoy!