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paigegreenphotography

Farm Flower Photos (this is film)

Our first ever Farm Flower Photos with Chloris Floral and Grace and Gather at Windrush Farm was so beautiful, we can hardly stand it…

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Outside the barn was crazy with rain and hail storms, but inside our barn was like…

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We had so much fun that we would love to do it again.

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At another farm. In another state. With different animals. And with lots more people. WE are OPEN to anything. If you’d like to play with flowers on a farm, please send us a message and let us know.

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Thank you times a million to Laura Schneider for helping make it all happen, once again.

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(All of these photos were photographed on medium format film.)

There is no place like home… (free photo shoot offer at your home)

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“No matter who you are or where you’re from, home means something to you. Homes serve as the backdrop for our childhood memories as well as the background of the interpersonal dramas in our lives. Our homes hold an iconic status as a place we can always belong. A place we can always be ourselves, let our guard down and still be loved. Home is a place you look forward to, a place where just being yourself is good enough,” Dr Robi Ludwig.

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As of September 15th, 2015, Reuters is reporting that 584 homes have been destroyed by the Lake County fires.

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While having your home burn down isn’t the end of the world, when your whole community (13,000 residents) and the land around it (more than 67,000 acres) burns down as well… I think it might feel pretty close to the end of your world.

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It is certainly not something I ever hope to experience.

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This being the first time I have lived so close to a crisis of this scale, it is so powerful and moving to see my community rally together to help the families who have lost everything and I want to do my part as well.

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So I am offering FREE one hour digital photo shoots in Petaluma to the first 10 people who donate $250 or more to one of the following organizations that is raising money to support the relief efforts for the victims of the Lake County area fires (value $450.)

Redwood Credit Union

Petaluma Animal Shelter

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Once you make a donation directly to the organization, please send your proof of payment to: studio@paigegreen.com and we will set up a time to photograph your family in your home.

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Offer is good for a one hour family digital photo shoot in Petaluma and it includes five high-resolution digital files. Additional files can be purchased. Additional travel fee for photo shoots outside of Petaluma. 

This is film (and my summer)…

I love film and I love summer.

And I couldn’t live without either one.

Well, maybe I could.

But life would be a lot less interesting and a lot less fun.

The only problem is that they are both so very time-consuming.

This summer was so busy that it seemed not to exist at all.

But I know it did because I have the film to prove it.

Even with the endlessly long summer days,

It seemed there still was never enough time…

To stop.

Or even pause and devote the time that film selfishly demanded.

So it sat neglected.

Piling up on my desk.

Waiting in the sidelines, as digital got all the glory.

Waiting for the grand finale.

And finally, here, the first day of October, it is.

A few of the summer film highlights, all at once.

Like cliffs notes.

Or the final minutes of a firework show.

But I still have high hopes of devoting a full post to each of these amazing occasions, faces, relationships.

I have even started the spinning the narratives in my head.

But time is running out.

As it is known to do.

And so this will have to do for now.

This showcase of why I love film and why I hope you will too.

Besides the obvious yet unpredictable beauty of film,

I also love its more discreet yet unfaltering faithfulness.

I feel comforted knowing that if disaster struck, and all my hard drives suddenly crashed tomorrow,

My film would still be there, sitting in a pile on my desk.

Waiting patiently in line to be filed away.

And talking excitedly about the summer that really did exist.

Too many cooks, not enough eggs….


My friend Kelly saw that I needed an idea for Jude and Paige’s Adventures in Stock project, so she called me up with her vision: bathtub, full of eggs, with her, cowboy boots and a bird’s nest in her hair. I said, “Perfect! I’ll get the tub and eggs.”

I have been wanting a tub in a field shot for a long time….but the eggs part was all Kelly. So I spent the day running around, gathering and hard boiling. I quickly realized that the 3 cartons of 5 dozen eggs (180 eggs), although it sounds like a lot, is not much when you want to fill a bathtub. So I put in the call for Kelly to buy more eggs.

So she bought 3 more cartons of 5 dozen eggs, which we didn’t have time to hard boil, but even filling the tub with blankets and covers, 360 eggs were still not enough.

Another problem was that we had two very different and competing visions… one wanted wild and mysteriously arty, and the other wanted tame stock…. so 360 eggs later, I am disappointed to say that I don’t think either of the visions felt very satisfied with the results.

But as always, we learned lots of lessons: more eggs, one vision, less cooks and try and mark the hard boiled ones because trying to find out which ones are raw, by spinning and shaking, is very time consuming…. and can lead to broken eggs in your ear if you shake too hard.


Photo lessons

I have a fabulous young photography student, who I have been working with for probably a year if you add it all up. And today our task was to photograph one object in as many different ways as we could. So we played with one of her dolls, who was most agreeable, even when she was dropped on her head.

This cute doll, called “Girl in a Bear Suit” was made by a talented artist, Heidi Iverson, who sells her felted artwork at Knitterly in Petaluma. She was so cute that I couldn’t resist taking my own. It was a great lesson in product photography and finding good light.

still learning….always learning

After using medium format all summer…..where the camera is so slow and therefore each photograph is so slow and at every shoot I take an average of 3-5 frames of each person……I forgot how to use 35 mm and I forgot how when you photograph a 6 year old, there is no slow…..but photographing Hannah while I was visiting SF, I had to relearn and relearn very very fast.

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Hannah on the stairs is my favorite shot….so I did get a few keepers, but I got a lot of ‘oppses’ as well….but it is so wonderful that Marla, the mother of Hannah, appreciates film and actually requests film over digital, even though it costs more. The quality shows….and I fell in love with black and white all over again.

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This was the third time I have photographed Hannah and it has been so fun to see her grow up from a 3 year old with a cast, to a 6 year old, who in her saucy-polka-dotted-halter dress looks much older than she is, until you make her laugh and suddenly her big toothless grin appears and reminds you she is still just a little girl.

To see more photos from this shoot click here.

And again, I have to give credit to my wonderful assistant and boyfriend, Arann, who made many of the toothless grins possible….I couldn’t have done it without him. It is nice to have an assistant who you love and who is good at assisting.

The Town Clerk at home

“Family is everything.”

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This is Sandra Gowan’s family. Sandra is the town clerk. Her husband is the town magistrate. Her mom worked a textile mill, the old industry, and her son works at the BMW plant, the new industry.

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today’s farms

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Today we are farming houses in America and we are farming grass to put in the yards of our houses…..

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and to put on our golf courses that surround our really fancy houses.

inspiration

This weekend I went to Atlanta to visit an old friend. While I was there I discovered, by chance, that there was an Annie Leibovitz exhibit at the High Museum of Art.

For a brief moment, I thought maybe I didn’t need to go, because I saw her talk last fall in Berkeley, California, and I have her book Annie Leibovitz: a Photographer’s Life which the images in the show come from….but I was in need of a good dose of inspiration, so that moment of doubt didn’t last very long. I went with Betsy, an old friend who is not a photography person at all, and I got exactly the inspiration I was looking for.

The show was well worth the $15 entry fee….for me, I don’t know about for Betsy. I enjoyed staring at the faces in the enlarged portraits and then to getting in close to her smaller intimate personal photographs, that I am so happy she included in this collection. My favorite part was a side room that was filled with hundreds of small photos grouped in chronological order to show her editing process for the book. It was wonderful to stand and get lost in the walls of that room. I could have spent at least two hours in that section, but I was with Betsy the non-photography friend and she looked ready to go, and I had promised I wouldn’t stay too long…….so although I left earlier than I would have liked, by going with Betsy I was able to hear the reaction from a photography civilian…..she admitted she had a hard time telling which photographs were supposed to be good….she admitted they are better than ones she could take, but she thought some of them looked like ones I could have taken……now I don’t know that I agree with that statement, at all, but the point that I took was that it is important to remember that not everyone is as trained to see the differences in photographs as we, photography nuts, are.

The other thing that I realized is: unless you are taking photographs of celebrities…no one really cares that much….so you can do whatever you want. And on my way out of Atlanta, with my new inspiration and my new liberation, I visited Summer and Michael and their new baby Camden….the photos of her have received more hits than any of my other summer work. Why? Not because they are amazing but because her family who lives on the other side of the country cares……so photography can have different purposes…..we take photos to make us happy and we take photos to make others happy……it is nice to be able to do both.

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to see more click here

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