Author: Benjamin Bloom

Yesterday, the skiing at Stowe wasn’t all that, but the company was good. Having someone around to laugh with makes rough conditions much more entertaining. Today, the plan was to head to Smuggler’s Notch for some quick lift served laps. Last night, I heard that Smuggs delayed their opening until Tuesday which left me a dilemma; do I skin somewhere like Bolton where the conditions would be much like yesterday or do I head to Smuggs to skin under the snowmaking.

It turns out, the answer is neither. The skiing is just getting going and the fact that we don’t have snow in the Champlain valley means that the mountain biking is still pretty good. I headed to Saxon Hill instead with the intent of riding around and taking some photographs. It turns out, I wasn’t the only one with biking on the brain; there were between 10 and 15 cars parked at the end of Thompson Drive when I turned the corner.

I’ve had a few great senior portrait sessions recently. This past weekend I photographed my brother in law in New Hampshire. Chris is the starting varsity goalkeeper at Souhegan High School. I knew we needed some standard portraits and Chris’ Mom made a request for a soccer shot of him in front of the net. Once I knew we had some more traditional portraits in the bag, we took out the lights and created a few dramatic portraits.

The more traditional portraits:

Earlier in the week, I photographed Erika at the Mills Riverside Park in Underhill, VT.  When we arrived there were a dozen school busses and a high school cross country meet going on.  This meant we couldn’t shoot in the places I was most familiar with, but I think that worked in our favor.  We scouted out a few locations and made some great photos!

I was on vacation last week and it felt great.  I spent the week down in Rhode Island on the Misquamicut shore.  The beaches are nice and the waves can get large enough to be scary (well, for an east coast mountain boy like myself.)

Our neighbor at the beach house:

I have a mountain of photographs to sort through, but most of those have taken a back burner to my day job and to a few paid gigs that I still need to finish my post processing on.  For family & friends looking for them, you’ll have to wait a few more days!

While I was down there, I had the pleasure of taking some photographs of my cousin, Anna.  She’s getting ready for her Bat Mitzvah in January and her parents requested some portraits for a slideshow.  We had a great time walking around a beach town taking some great photos:

Just before vacation, I spent a morning with my sister and her fiance, taking some engagement photos.  They’re getting married in just about a month!  How time flies…

And when I returned home, my sister in law was playing hockey so we went to watch.  Of course, I couldn’t leave my camera behind so I took a stab at hockey photography.  It’s different than many sports and is a challenge to shoot!  Part of the problem is that I don’t know the sport as well as I could so it’s hard to predict where the good shot will be. (That could be compounded by the fact that this is a pickup league and sometimes plays just don’t develop.)  I had a great time, however, and it looks like I’ll be at another game on Sunday.

Lastly, I had heard about a contest that Scott Kelby was running so I dug this photo out of my archives and submitted it.  The winner gets to shoot an NCAA football game with Scott and Mike Olivella!