Happy 1st Birthday, Anaya!

April 25, 2008 | 1 Comment

What a face! Adorable Anaya just turned 1-year-old! (Photo by Julia Pelish)

Princess Anaya celebrated her first birthday on Saturday in Surrey with her family and closest friends, including Minnie Mouse!

By the end of the festivities, faces were covered with paint, icing and smiles. Mom (Rekha) and Dad (Edwin) joined in the fun as Anaya got started on Year 2 of life with lots of well wishes and gifts. With grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all on hand, she held court in the clubhouse and captivated everyone with her beautiful grin.

I had a blast photographing the party - how could you not with a room full of delirious kids?

Birthday girl Anaya parties with Mom, Dad and Minnie Mouse at the Clubhouse. (Photo by Julia Pelish)

Jan

10

Family Portraits Last a Lifetime - and Beyond

January 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment

I have a big family. Two brothers, two sisters, and my parents. I live across the continent from all of them except for my older brother in Nebraska, who is still a long, long way away.

When you’re far from family, you reach for anything that evokes home. Emails and phone calls are absolutes for me, so are the annual visits I make back to Dutchess County in upstate New York.

I love Vancouver, but it’s difficult being apart. It’s why I tell my clients that they’ll always treasure their family portraits. You never know where life will take you and those photographs are wonderful heirlooms and historical documents for our lives when we’re all together in one place.

Unlike at a wedding, when the schedule for brides and grooms is tight and the time for portraits is rightly focused on them, the family portrait provides for two or more hours of attention on the entire group and the dynamic relationships within it.

To read more about this topic, visit my main website for an article on “Hiring a Vancouver Portrait Photographer”.

For package prices or to schedule a portrait, contact me by email (julia@juliapelish.com) or phone (604-836-1412). My standard family portrait package is $395 and includes:

- 2 hours of personal service by myself and an assistant on location, in your home or in my Yaletown home-studio.
- Use of my studio equipment, including full professional lighting system, multiple Nikon bodies and lenses, and more.
- 1 large custom print (11×14 size) that’s matted and framed.
- 2 other smaller custom prints (5×7 each) presented in folio.
- Digital processing, enhancing and editing of all images.
- A web gallery of images from which to select.

I also offer packages that include stylists and wardrobe consultants, as well as additional prints and albums, and film images taken with a medium-format Hasselblad camera with Zeiss lenses. Let me know what you’d like!

PHOTO: Cindy, Samantha and Isabella, as photographed in 2007. (Photo by Julia Pelish)

Jan

6

Vancouver Children’s Portraits That Endure

January 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Children’s Portraits by Julia Pelish.

If you’re like me, you have close friends and family who send out the cutest, messiest, most candid photographs of their young kids. They usually arrive as attachments in email and many turn out to be hilarious. How can you not burst out laughing at the sight of your two-year-old niece’s plump face covered in Gerber applesauce?

Those photos are adorable and the ones that end up being kept will one day be great blackmail material when the kids turn into ultracool teenagers. But the thing I don’t see much of any more are hard copies of those pictures. As we transfer more and more of our lives to the virtual world, we lose the scrapbooks and boxes full of snapshots that so many of us have had as keepsakes.

We erase our digital cards and those shots are lost. We clean out our email folders and the memories with them. We fill up our hard drives with new photos and the old ones get shunned into the “trash”.

Recently I’ve seen an increase in the number of moms and dads contacting me for portraits of their kids and I wonder if it’s not because we’re seeking to stop the gradual erosion of permanence. To visitors to our homes, beautiful portraits in an attractive frame are decorative talking pieces, but to the parents they’re precious keepsakes. Being able to freeze time has fascinated me from the first time I took a photograph for this reason. The more portraits I take of kids, the more I realize how special it is to be able to capture their images in a studio or location setting. It’s true - they grow up quick. In a way, pictures keep them young; preserving not only their image but our time spent with them when they’re so innocent.

Vancouver, of course, offers many wonderful opportunities to take children’s portraits. Granville Island, Stanley Park and Spanish Banks are always winning locations for a Vancouver family portrait. Children are also very comfortable in their own homes and some of my best shots have been in that setting. The photo above was taken in my Yaletown home studio. I hope you can see what I mean about how precious a photograph of a child can be.