jennifer durham – Kelley Eskridge

In Seattle? Get your photo on…

Our fabulous photographer friend Jennifer Durham is currently running a special for individual or family portraits. If you or someone you know is in Seattle, considering giving yourself/them the gift of good pictures of themselves. It’s a great Father’s Day gift as well as a lovely idea for family portraits or special occasions.

Seriously, making people look great in photos is a talent. Jennifer has the ability to make us all look our best: call me vain, but, well, I like looking my best. It’s not that I want the map of my life airbrushed out of my face — I earned those lines and I have mostly liked the journey. But I do want to look like what I think of as myself — I want to see on the outside what I feel myself to be on the inside. Jennifer’s great at that. She took the photo that Nicola uses on Ask Nicola, and I think it looks just like her, outside and inside (and you can see it in the banner over at Jennifer’s special offer.

So. If you’re in town, go get you some of that. It’ll only take 15 minutes, and it will make you feel great.

I’ll be back next week with, you know, conversation (I know, it’s been ages). Enjoy your weekend.

One way to make it a beautiful year

My awesome photographer friend Jennifer Durham has done it again.

I think Jennifer’s talent is blazing and amazing. Her work makes me go still, opens up spaces inside of me, and fills me with a great sense of calm and wonder at the world. I can tell a hundred different stories about the same photo, because really the stories are all inside of me just waiting for something to call them out. Isn’t that what great art does?

I’m delighted that Jennifer is now making her work available in a 2010 calendar. The images are… well, they are everything. Powerful. Expansive. Joyful. Simple. Layered. And optimistic: essentially hopeful. These are all things I could use a hearty dose of in 2010. How about you?

See for yourself. Jennifer’s blog includes an order link and a complete slideshow of calendar images. Please share Jennifer’s link with your friends and spread the word that for the price of a calendar, we can all have more beauty in 2010.

Family Photo Event

If you live in the LA area and are looking for a great holiday gift or a way to celebrate a special family moment, check out awesome photographer Jennifer Durham’s new business — Family Photo Event.

photo by Jennifer Durham/Family Photo Event

In a quick and easy session (and I mean quick!), Jennifer captures your family in a beautiful setting and a happy moment — a birthday, anniversary, holiday, special event in your child’s life, or just because it’s time you all got together for a photo. I know from personal experience how easy she is to work with and how gifted she is as a photographer: two of her nature prints hang in my house, and you can bet the next time I’m in LA, I’ll be booking a session for a new author photo.

I treasure the family photos I have, even the blurry Polaroids and the ones where someone seems to be missing part of their head. I wish I had more like the ones Jennifer creates, that capture people looking relaxed and comfortable, simply being themselves together. These are the kind of photos that people return to again and again to look at with a smile, that make a guest say, Oh, this is great. You all look so happy!

Go check out Jennifer’s work. Give a session as a gift to friends or family in the LA area. And stay tuned: I’m hoping that she’ll be offering other ways to share her talent with people.

Images of 2008 (part 1)

Yesterday Nicola posted about the beautiful photography of Jennifer Durham, and I wrote about the power of music. The power of the visual is different for me, but equally important, equally compelling. Images can be powerful stories, can touch a place in me that’s inarticulate: Jennifer’s work does that. And so do these entirely different images: The Year 2008 in Photographs from Boston.com. It’s a three-part series: you can follow the links to parts 2 and 3 yourself if you’re the impatient type (grin), but I’ll be posting those links over the next couple days.