Friends, clients, and new friends

I often say I have the best job in the world, and one of the reasons is the great people I meet. My clients often become my friends. And sometimes my friends become clients, and our friendship is deepened through the joy of capturing images that become part of their family heritage.

My friends the Mickleys are a great example. We met at church and our friendship quickly grew. I photographed their family for my own purposes in the beginning – I was selling stock photography and my main subject was family relationships. I photographed generational pictures, staged photos of game playing and quickie family portraits, as I only knew how to photograph journalistically. As I grew into portraiture, I was officially hired for senior pictures. And then came the highlight of my portrait career – they paid me to photograph their daughter's wedding in Switzerland.

Chari was working as an au pair (nanny) in Zurich. She met Chris at an international church. It was an amazing and unique wedding, beginning with Chris swimming across the lake to the church! The guests came from all over the world - Malasia, Australia, Scotland. The Mickleys and I stayed with the groom's mother. Doris could only speak Swiss German and the Mickleys, English. 30 years earlier I was an exchange student in Germany, and most of my German stayed on the shelf, but a week of translating for the in-laws brought back much of the language.

Chris and Chari continued to live in Switzerland for the next four years, adding two baby boys to the family. I photographed their growing family during their visits. Then in 2010 they moved to Whatcom County where Chris is now in ministry.

Chris' mom visits during the summer and I get another chance to renew my German skills and strengthen our friendship. This year I photographed their family and parents at the Mickley's home, which was in peak fall color.

We grow, we grow older, hopefully wiser, and certainly closer as friends. I really do have the best job in the world.

Old Friends and Turtles

Seventeen years ago we travelled with our tent trailer across America to Washington DC, where we lived for four months while my husband Leo was a loaner reporter for USA Today. We spent a month getting there, visiting America's wonders and our friends along the way. One night we landed at a KOA in Rapid City, SD, at 2 a.m., after a vain search for a state park. We caught the pancake breakfast just before closing, late the next morning. As we wearily applied forks to pancakes, the elderly couple across the table beamed at us. "You must be turtles too," they said. We look at them with confusion. "We call ourselves the 'turtles' because we move pretty slowly." We laughed and agreed that we too, were turtles. We enjoyed a cheery breakfast with our new friends, Joe and Wilba Grotts, then packed up, toured Mt. Rushmore and pulled in at a campground near Wall Drug, in Wall, S.D. The Turtles were waiting. We were delighted to learn our paths headed in the same direction, so we spent the next two days traveling together, touring as far as Mitchell Corn Palace in Nebraska before they drove their RV home to St. Louis and we stopped in Centralia, Mo., to visit Leo's family.

Over the years we met up with Joe and Wilba. They even visited us here in Lynden. Wilba drew little turtles on the envelopes of her letters. About a year after Leo died of a heart attack in 2000, Joe passed on. Wilba said he started failing after he learned about Leo's death. Eventually Wilba's health declined and she was a shut-in at her home, where we visited several times. Last summer we camped at the same KOA where me met the turtles, and sent Wilba a postcard featuring a story about their famous pancake breakfasts.

Last week Leo Jr. and I spent Thanksgiving with my daughter Lainie, my in-laws and five brother-in-laws and their families. It was a wonderful reunion. On Friday we stopped by to visit Wilba on the way to the airport. We arrived the same day that hospice was to arrive. We spent a half hour with Wilba, remembering old times and holding hands. On Sunday her daughter called to tell me she had passed on, at age 90. Meanwhile the rest of us turtles keep plugging along, grateful for friends met along the way.

With love, from Uganda to America

My friend Tammy works for Childcare Worldwide, a child sponsorship organization out of Bellingham. Her work has taken her all over the world from Haiti to Uganda. But something special happened during her trips to Uganda - she met a boy named Nathan and knew that work life would soon spill over into home life. A little over a year ago she finalized the adoption and Nathan moved home to Lynden. This fall we celebrated his new life with his mom, Tammy, in America with a photo session at Berthusen Park in Lynden. I'm a member of Celebrating Adoption. Photographers give adoptive families free sessions, free proofs, and 15% off their order. It's a neat program and I'm delighted to celebrate adoption in Whatcom County! Welcome Nathan!

Teaching and photographing this fall has been hectic, fun and pretty much crazy! I think I may like teaching as well as photography! I get really excited seeing people liberated from automatic settings and set free to control their art. I also want to help people who love photography to grow! And yes, I am creating competition for myself, but I'd rather help develop competition that raises the standard of the industry by their art and their business practices. This month I am teaching "How to Become a Professional Photographer" at Skagit Valley College. I'll be teaching the same course with a slightly different name at Whatcom Community College beginning winter quarter. I'll be taking over my friend Sam Gardner's class, while he moves on to new adventures. This week's pictures illustrate William Hogarth's "Line of Beauty." I learned about Hogarth, an 18th-century painter, from Ken Whitmire, one of the finest portrait photographers in Washington. Ken has had his studio for over 50 years! I heard Ken this weekend at the Professional Photographers of Washington fall conference. I already new that the "S" curve is a line of beauty, especially in portraits of women. I learned that the elongated "S" is considered the most beautiful shape. I realized that we see this everywhere in art and nature. I've included some of my own examples, as well as the famous (infamous?) photo from a popular 80s movie and a logo you will recognize.

Teaching Digital Photography

Last night I taught a class on digital photography at Skagit Valley College in Mt. Vernon. I had 7 students and I think I left them with an information overload! There is so much to learn in photography that I think I forget I've been learning it for 30 years. I've had a bit of time for all that data to sink in, and I'm the first to admit that some of it never did sink! It just sort of slipped away... I had a great time teaching and putting together material to illustrate the topic. These are some fun and crazy pictures I took to illustrate how shutter speed creatively affects photos. In these cases I was panning a moving subject (the truck), zooming while photographing (the leaves), and moving the camera on a stationary object (a grove of trees). If you want to have some fun, go out and try these shots! If you need advice on how to make them happen, send me an email: karen@karenmullen.com. I love teaching!

Finding Meaning in Sorrow

I've been following the story all week of Rachel, a 9-year-old girl who was raising money for clean water in Africa instead of asking for birthday presents. Then an accident on Interstate 90 took her life. She had raised $220 before her death. At last count, she has raised $626,424. The story went viral, being tweeted by Matt Hasselbeck, the Seahawk's quarterback. Seattle Times picked up the story and it's gone as far as Australia, which I'm pretty sure is a far as you can get from Washington.
The story caught my attention in two ways. First of all, I have a tender heart towards people who lose loved ones. That alone was all it took for me to cry. But to see the way people have given to her cause (more than 18,000 individuals and groups), put it all in a different perspective. Although Rachel's family would never sacrifice their daughter to help Africans get clean water, it does give a glimmer of meaning, of hope, of a promise that if nothing else, some good will come of her tragic death.
This is something I struggled with regarding my own husband's death, almost 11 years ago. I wished desperately at the time for some way to attach meaning to his death. It took me three years to give up that song. The meaning that people tried to comfort me with only created anger - to tell me that so-and-so's husband went to the doctor because of Leo's death and found out that they needed to be on medication. That did not comfort me. I gave up searching for meaning and eventually learned just to lean on God and believe that His ways and plans surpass my understanding and to be okay with that.
And to be sure, my kids have a greater understanding of loss and grief and with it an unusual degree of compassion. If we can't find meaning in loss, we can at least do the best with it that we can.
If you would like to add to Rachel's clean water for Africa fund, here is the link: http://www.mycharitywater.org/p/campaign?campaign_id=16396.

Pirates, love and more

Saturday I had the amazing privilege of photographing Trisha and Tyler's piratical wedding aboard The Lady Washington, the tall ship used in "Pirates of the Caribbean."
Amidst the chaos of the crew running pell mell during our mock battle with the Hawaiian Chieftan, Trisha and Tyler managed to visit with their guests, snatch romantic moments and laugh a lot. After the battle (we won!), Tyler's fire chief performed the ceremony on the forecastle (at least I think that's where it was... or maybe I'm just hoping it wasn't the poop deck!). They drank from a German two-sided wine glass, raised a pirate flag and entered on the biggest commitment of their lives. I'm quite sure they are ready, and the two families demonstrated their love and support fully. I'm a "bonder" and I already miss these crazy, wonderful people who sailed into my life and left me a better pirate. I mean, person.

Strong Families

This week's photos feature the Stumpf family. Their boys are truly gentle giants - the tallest at 6'9"! They were a blast to photograph and it was touching to watch their affection and care for their little sister. Paul and Ramona homeschool their kids and Addison leaves for Hillsdale college in the fall, with four possible majors in mind.
Speaking of majors, Ramona, my husband and I were all journalism majors. Ramona worked with my husband years ago at the Bellingham Herald, during some difficult times. Though what was difficult then is nothing like what journalists are facing these days... staffs cut in half and in half again, the shrinking paper size, shrinking readership... and yet the love of writing and journalism continue to flourish. My daughter is in grad school studying journalism at the University of Missouri, where my husband I met and graduated. I expect she will end up working with some online journalism source. Who knows? The face of our world is changing so rapidly. I'm so glad that we have solid families, like the Stumpfs, to guide children into the next generation.

I've been crazy busy editing wedding photos, building slide shows, and trying to keep up with the rest of my patient clients! June 17 I was in Boise, photographing my best friend Karen's daughter's wedding! They flew Lainie in from graduate school in Missouri to photograph with me. We make a great team! So do JulieAnne and Jacob, the happily wedded couple, now returned from a week in Disneyworld. These two have been steady for 5 years and there were no doubts that they have a love that will endure. It was a blast photographing them and their family and friends, all super supportive and enjoying a 2-day party, between the rehearsal and the reception.
The back story, and one that I love to tell, is that Karen and I were best friends in 6th grade. She came from a Christian family, and my family was Christian Scientist, though we rarely attended church. Karen shared with me her faith in Jesus, and I listened without much interest, except that I was intrigued with the relationship she had with her brother Mark, who was the same age as my next oldest brother. Mark and Karen fought, but they also played and seemed to really love each other! My brother and I were sworn enemies. I wanted to have that kind of relationship. She gave me a copy of "The Four Spiritual Laws," which is a little tract, the kind you find in restrooms! I took it home and read it, and for the first time I understood all she had been trying to tell me. I prayed and asked Jesus to be my Lord. My life has never been the same, and within a few years I too had a great relationship with both of my brothers, and still do to this day. The change came with me, of course - I learned how to love. My parents, who were already great parents, came to faith in Jesus a few years later. My dad was the most amazing, wonderful, Christian man, and has already begun his life in paradise. Well, I could go on forever, but I really want to post some pictures!

back again

Well I've taken a long blog break, but I hope to be more consistent this summer. Of course I also hope to eat better, exercise more... you'll just have to wait and see how long I can keep up all of these good intentions!
This week I am packing my equipment for a road trip to Boise, where I will photograph JulieAnn and Jacob's wedding! This is an incredibly exciting wedding for me, because JulieAnn is the daughter of my childhood best friend, and still one of my best friends, Karen. And Karen and her husband Curt are flying Lainie out from grad school in Columbia, Mo., to be my assistant! Lainie and I used to photograph a lot together, but she has pursued her own dreams of acting and journalism these past few years.
I'll post photos from the wedding next week. In the meantime, here are some recent engagement pictures for weddings I'll be photographing later on this summer.
with love, Karen

Idea

One of my baby clients came up with a great idea: instead of getting the "Beloved Baby" 9-image print for the first session, she is getting one for each of the 3 first year sessions! What an awesome way to beautifully document the amazing first year of a child's life. We'll be photographing her first year portraits so soon! Time flies when you have a baby :)