These photographs are from a whole series of images I shot recently while back home visiting my friends and family. I focused on capturing southern people, southern places, and southern activities. My goal by doing so is to hopefully land a client I have dreamed of shooting for. I will be doing a blog post in the future that includes the best of everything I shot that week, but I got multiple great shots during some of the shoots. Out of all these great shots, only the best of best will make it into this new portfolio. I hate not to share the others at all though, especially since the people shown in some of them were nice enough to give me their time. They followed my instructions in order to help me make my vision for each shoot become a reality. I like sharing the stories of people I photograph, so I am going to write a short blog post about the people featured in some of the shoots I did as sort of a thank you for them giving me their time. This post is one of a few I plan on writing about the various people I photographed that week.

The guy you see in these shots is named Blake. He is the twelve-year-old son of Evans Sevor, a guy that grew up in the same community I’m from back home. I had planned on doing a fishing shot that evening, but what I had originally planed fell through. So, not wanting to let the beautiful evening light go to waste, I randomly showed up at Evans’ house and asked if I could borrow his son for a shoot right then. Blake was okay with it, so I instructed him to put on certain clothes to emphasize the country boy look I wanted him to have in the shots.

Blake really is a country boy though, so he didn’t have to act too hard for me. He will be in seventh grade at Madison Academy in Madison, FL this coming school year where he tells me history is his favorite subject. His favorite hobby is playing baseball – he dreams of playing professionally one day. Being a music lover myself, I had to ask him what type of music he was into and who his favorite artist is. “Country” and “Colt Ford” he told me. So, having never heard of him, I looked up Colt Ford on iTunes — apparently there is a new genre of music that is a hybrid of country and rap. I’m always up for listening to new artist and genres of music, so thank you for introducing me to something new, Blake. And thank you for being so patient with me while I did these photos. You were perfect. They couldn’t have come out better I don’t think.

Here you see the result of a catfish getting his spine into Blake’s knee. Catfish have three poisonous spines, one on each side of their body and one on top. It can be quite painful if you managed to let them stick you with one of them, therefore you have to hold them a certain way while getting the hook out of their mouth. Well, in this case I was asking Blake to hold the catfish he had caught out in front of him and the catfish ended up swinging right into his knee. I could see the pain on his face through my lens when it happened. I was surprised when he pulled up his pants leg to find blood running down leg. I’ve never had one draw blood on me that bad. So, that is what this and the previous two shots are showing. Way to take one for the cause, Blake.

Labs and water just belong together. This one belongs to, Donnie Waldrep, the owner of the property I was shooting on.