Sunday’s Un-Birthday Party was the Un-Official Launch of Paige and Jude Photo, a Partnership and Adventure in stock photography. Petaluma photographer, and my new friend, Jude Mooney, has been dreaming of stock for the past few years… and she decided in order to make her dream a reality, she needed a partner… and lucky for me…. she picked me. So we started our journey by having an un-birthday party in her brightly colored breakfast nook.

The un-birthday party went exactly as planned, well, except for lumpy icing, a grumpy young party go-er (not pictured here), and minor technical mishaps with camera settings… but all in all it was a successful first shoot

However, there was one other minor important point to mention. During the shoot, it took me a little while to get used to the artificial element that comes from staging everything, but I realize now that is because I am coming from a hands-off documentary photography approach, so it makes perfect sense.

But because of that feeling, and because the whole scene was Jude’s creation anyway, I let Jude do most of the photographing on Sunday. I did manage to capture some candid moments and I played with my beloved Rollei a little, but I look forward to jumping in more actively on the next shoot. I think learning how to produce and direct photo shoots is going to be a well-needed challenge for me. I also look forward to setting up some scenes that I have been imagining, but would probably never make into a reality my own. And most importantly, I look forward to just having fun with photography with another photographer…. so let the adventures begin! And maybe it was a real birthday afterall.