arizona wedding photography ~ brenda eden photography

{April's daughter}

{April's daughter}

{Aimee and her son}

{V hunting for cascarones}

I love how seriously April and Ed's daughter took this egg hunt.

It wasn't fun and games, it was WORK and she was a champ at it.

The eggs were cascarones, confetti-filled eggs, and after she found them, she cracked them open. And took that pretty seriously too.

{Egg Hunt}

I'm trying different ways of processing with this image, trying to give it a creamy pink cast. I like the way it turned out.

{Starring this girl!}

Here are a few photos starring the Reece family daughter.  

When I am photographing two and three year olders I know I will be running like crazy. Having to run a lot last weekend was probably a good thing - I had no idea what was coming in the week ahead -  these past few days I kinda knocked myself out with exercise. Not on purpose, it just kind of happened. I went on a really long hike up in Flagstaff with my cousin, and part of it was down into a canyon and back out again. You know, at Flagstaff elevation. And then I played/practiced frisbee for 4 hours. Yes, 4 hours. And then I went to a dance practice for about an hour and a half. This is only the second weekend my mom hasn't had to be at Mayo all weekend long since sometime in February, so I think I am making up for lost time by doing a ton of stuff these past couple weekends.

So, anyways, I ran around like crazy last weekend photographing people, but it was nothing compared to the last few days. I am wondering if I will be dying tomorrow.

Maybe I will, maybe I won't. Either way, if I took Easter egg hunt/portrait session pics of you and your kids the last couple weeks, you will be getting them very soon. :)

This first image is processed so differently than how I normally process. Usually I try to go for a very natural look - ideally I would like it to look like 35 mm film images. But to "save" this image I had to over process it and over saturate it to get the image. I love how it turned out. I think it looks like a poster for this girl's life!

The next one is of her collecting eggs. The light was so perfect! 

The final image is of her and her whole family and it really didn't take anything to get her dancing so cutely, just me saying Dance, Dance, Dance!

{Trevor and Sophie}

 Trevor and Sophie found a nest of confetti eggs.

They also found a bunch of plastic eggs full of jelly beans. :)

{After the Easter Egg Hunt}

Happy girl.

Later that night, her mom texted me to tell me that this girl's favorite part of her day was when I chased her with my camera. :)

More photos soon of the egg hunt and confetti eggs.

{Platinum girl}

One more image from last year's Easter Egg Hunt and portrait session. I like using Photoshop to get different looks in the images I create. I was kind of going for the look of platinum here. Platinum is so beautiful, you can read about it here. Also, her hair was pretty fly-a-way, so I fixed it a little bit, but left some of the fly-aways, because I like the way it looks. I do a lot of what I think of as "behind the scenes" photoshopping for my client's images. I don't usually even get around to telling people what I did to the images to make them look a certain way, but that's just something to know: If I take your photos, I spend a big chunk of time making them look awesome in Photoshop. You will never get images from me that are just straight out of the camera. I work on them a lot! 

{Helen + Kent + kids}

I met up with Helen and Kent to get photos for them and their kids.

Here's their daughter crawling.

Intense glowy winter morning light - I love it.

I was a little concerned the light would be too bright, but we went to this place where cottonwood trees grow and it was beautiful and worked out perfectly.

Their son loves numbers and was making them out of blades of grass. Here's the number seven.

And here's the number eight.

Momma's!

I try to make you laugh when I am taking pictures of you. And sometimes, if I have had a LOT of coffee, I'm pretty good at it.

Thanks Helen and Kent!

{Kent and his daughter}

{Helen + Kent's daughter}

She was crawling towards me and my camera and I had to keep moving back. Usually I have to chase babies when I take their photos, but it felt like she was chasing me. 

{Taryn + family}

Becky and I got to take photos of Taryn and her kids. Taryn and I went to high school together but somehow we never met. There were around a thousand kids in our graduating class, so it's not surprising that we never met, but it's too bad, but we have a friend in common (Hi Manny!) and that is how she knew about our work.

I was pretty excited when Taryn said she wanted to bring her dog to the portrait shoot. He was adorable and the way the kids interacted with him was adorable too. I would love to have a dog like him around (although I can only imagine what Kiki and the other cats would think!)

We walked around a park and neighborhood in the pretty early morning and got some cute photos of them.

Above: Before the sprinkers went on.

Below: After the sprinklers went on! :)

Becky showing the son how her camera works.

Thank you Taryn and family for having us get photos of you guys! :)

{Sunflowers & Sparklers}

Eek! I am so excited to share these! For a long time, for years and years actually probably, I have wanted to create portraits of people amidst sunflowers. When I was taking photo classes in college, I took some photos of some of my friends out in front of wild sunflowers that grew alongside the road next to a farm and I have always wanted to do that again. (I should see if I can find those photos and post them - they were in black and white film.)

I loved how these kids were so at home with nature. Tall grass, june bugs, bird poop, climbing up on the little hill where some of the sunflowers are growing, a sudden rain and dust storm - nothing fazed them. And when I looked back at the photos, I was really struck by the sweetness of the siblings toward each other. These kids just really love each other and it was so cool to see that I had caught little looks between them here and there. Scroll down and see what I mean - I'm especially thinking of the middle son looking at his older sister and the older sister with her hand on her youngest brother's head for a moment while they are all playing with the last sparkler, before we called it a night and went inside and had pizza! Oh and I especially love the look of the two boys as their mom is handing out the sparklers. See her hand in the top part of the frame and then see their expressions? That is exactly what I was hoping for when I started thinking about doing this kind of portrait shoot. I wanted to capture summer, the essence of summer and the joy and excitement that I think you can only feel when you are that age. Oh! My! Goodness! Sparklers!

These kids were total troopers. It was hot, of course, I mean it's July and it's Arizona, but they put up with the heat and we got some relief from a dust storm that started blowing in just as we were starting to shoot. It was a mild dust storm (compared to the massive dust storm we got two nights later) but it turned the sky a yellowish color and so if you scroll down a bit, you will see what I mean. When I was editing these photos, I tried to un-yellow them. I always shoot photos in camera raw and so I can change the color temperature, and I tried for a while before I remembered, hey! the sky really was very yellow due to the yellow dust the storm was blowing in. And luckily that dust storm also brought a little rain, and so if you notice the images where the two older kids are dancing? Well, it had just started to rain. Which made us all do a happy dance since it's been ages since we saw rain.

For this shoot, I finally got to use my Ralph Lauren paint that I got on clearance at Home Depot. I painted an old door with the bright blue metallic paint and faced it against a north wall (which makes for pretty light) and got to photograph the sister. (I have gold and silver and purple paint that I want to use on future shoots, and so it was cool to see that I really like the results with this paint.)

This shoot was so much fun! I definitely want to do more like this, with even more sparklers and more sunflowers. Thanks H. family for being so awesome! :)

Two sisters

These two sisters and their parents are just absolute sunshine. They came over around Easter for portraits.  I could post so many of them and I think I will come back and post more, but here are a few for now..... 

{Our Farm Portraits}

Around Christmas time, Brenda and I (Becky) hosted holiday portrait sessions on our property while the leaves on the trees were still golden and hadn't yet fallen.

Here are some of the pictures we took. These two little cousins and their families had a blast!

This session was so much fun. I can't wait for Arizona's desert to start rioting with wild poppies and daisies, so we can do our Wildflower Portrait sessions. We are also planning on doing more photo sessions on our property as soon as the apple trees are in bloom, and also a series of city sessions. If you would like us to photograph your family, then click here to contact us!

{Kelly + Bill underneath the trees}

Kelly and Bill underneath the trees, just as it was getting dark, not long after this the sun completely set, so I was getting dreamy-end-of-the-day light, which I love. I love how they are looking at each other in that second one---ahhh!

I was taking these photos of them, while Becky and their beautiful curly-haired baby boy were in the grass running around, playing and getting more photos of just him.

More photos of Kelly + Bill to come! 

((Side note story: Years and years ago we went to Hume Lake with Kelly and a bunch of other people from our college group. Bill might have been there (I'm not sure, sorry Bill!)  One story I remember from that trip is that Becky and Kelly and some other girls got up in the middle of the night and TP'ed the building the guys were sleeping in and later on Becky would talk about how much fun Kelly was. Do you remember that Kelly?! It was kinda a long time ago!))

{Planning a wedding for 2010 or 2011 and need photographers?

We're booking! Contact me, Brenda Eden, to find out more. Just email me at [email protected] and I will send you a link to our wedding photography information.

If you know your date, please include that date in your email, so I can let you know right away if we have your date available. Thanks and Happy Wedding Planning!!! :)}