Wow! What a month I've had... it seems like the last three to four weeks of the spring term were incredibly busy! Add to that the photography work that has been stacking up. I'm looking forward to the day when I might actually even get paid to shoot.

The big shoot of the month was a Trash the Dress session with Nichole. She's a good friend of mine who has always imagined being a model. When she told me this, I invited her to play model for the day. We got her hooked up with a dress, tossed some ideas back and forth and here we are...with one shoot behind us and at least one more to do!

We went out to the Dalles Mountain Ranch. If you've never been there, the time to visit is late spring. The Lupin and the Balsa Root were just on the tail end of their blooming cycle but we managed to find an area that was fairly well covered with flowers. We rolled in on Saturday evening, scouted our location, and then went back to the RV for some sleep. We got up at 3AM and Lori Stokes my wife, assistant, and stylist went to work on Nicole's hair while Nichole did her own makeup.

We hit the mountain at 5:30am to catch the sunrise, and the light couldn't have been better. Between Wil and I, we got hundreds of great photos, the light was perfect, the wind was unusually calm...the only bad thing was the haze obstructed the view of Mt Hood in the background in a couple of the shots...almost perfect, but as close as a guy could ask for!

We shot for hours, until we ran out of ideas, and as the wind began to pick up we then went to the ranch house and barn to shoot some more. We managed to kill another 2 hours of shooting by the barn, the ranch house, and then finally by the pond.

Finally at 11:30am nearly 6 hours later, we finally called it quits...shot out, flat light, but as happy as could be....

I have uploaded a couple of Nicole's photos in my gallery, and I will load a couple more in the coming days for you to enjoy. I'm looking forward to several more Trash the Dress shoots this summer!