Missy Cochran Oregon Photographer » Wedding and location Portrait Photography all over Oregon.

Turn on the jams and rock out!

Hi everyone, here’s the deal

If you book a family of children session to take place in May, you will get the session and the 8×10 print ready disc for $350!  I just bought a book about children’s portrait sessions (a very expensive book) and I want to try out the ideas.  So, let’s say you want to book a session.  Call me (or email and I will call you) and we will chat about what you are hoping to get out of the session.  I will ask about the images you like on my website so that we can book a similar session for you.  I will help you with clothing options phone and email.  The disc is for your personal use only.  You will still get a gallery for family to order from if they want to and it will be available to you for ordering large prints or albums, but if you only want the disc, that it totally fine!

This one is new, you pick the location (I will give you pointers when we chat).  I am charging $2 a mile for any location outside of zip code 97229 and I expect to travel since everything I photograph is on location.  I use google maps to figure out how much to charge for travel, so hopefully that will give you an idea.  Oh, and if you have a friend who wants to do this to and we book the session for the same day and location back-to-back, I will waive the travel fee up to 50 miles and if you have two friends (three sessions) at the same location, back-to-back, I will waive travel up to 100 miles.

This Month may book up really fast, so don’t wait to call! I am so excited to get some momentum taking portraits!!

The link to children’s portfolio

A fun little album I designed.  What do you think?  Should I buy a sample of it?  Jessi thinks the little illustrations are too kid-ish.  Should I just leave that part out and go with the layouts without the designs?

My recipe for pretty pictures

My sister + field + pretty light + half hour

Let bake for 1 hour in photoshop

I found this company that does some fun picture slideshows and put this one together of my little sister. Check it out.

For this session I got to leave Portland and travel to St Helen’s Oregon to take these family portraits.

Sometimes I feel like there aren’t enough boys on the blog so hopefully this session will balance it out a little.  In the last session I did with the little girl and the lollipop, I had more pictures of her than her brother and sometimes I feel a little bummed about that.  In that particular case it was because he wanted to run around instead of staying where I wanted him to so the ones I did get were because I was chasing him around the field, ha ha.  You may not be able to tell in these pictures, but we (myself plus mom and dad) were working hard to get everyone together for a family picture. 

The boys sat here for about three seconds before they ran in two directions.  The one with Lorna is awesome because she is trying to make it a game and smile herself.  Before I took the picture, her son was crying because she had picked him up and he wanted to go where he wanted to go.  You can even see the tear still in his eye.  Aren’t his blue eyes amazing?

One down, but the trick was getting them both with mom and dad at the same time.  We let them do some separate to get used to idea.

Now we are all together.  Dad’s amazing antics get both boys laughing.

Yay!!!  We finally got everyone together.  At this age, I don’t even try getting everyone to look at the camera.  If fact I tell the parents to be engaged with the kids and just make sure they aren’t blocking your faces.  The picture on the right is hilarious.  I was directed by Sage to take this picture.

I loved Lorna’s boots and needed an excuse to get some sassy pictures of them.  These are so fun!  Since when do you get engagement pictures after you are married?

Sassy boots again, love em!

This was so funny, Sage is stoked to get on the trike and ride around outside.  He is quickly discouraged by the fact that it is very difficult to peddle on grass.

Keeping up

This kid has so much personality, overflowing with it.  Too fun!  I laugh when I think of all the times he tried to run me over and curve away just in time to avoid actually hitting me.  The middle picture shows him doing exactly that.  Do you see that mischievous grin?

Jude was just in keep up mode and when Lorna said it was Jude’s turn on the trike, Sage went inside to vent his frustration in time out.  Turns out, he had missed his nap earlier and that is just the way things roll sometimes.  It’s tough being a kid.

How could I have forgotten to tell you?  Lorna is a photographer!  Here are some head shots I got for her at the end of the session.

Missy Cochran photographs children’s Photography in Portland Oregon and the surrounding areas.

This is just a quick post to give Lorna a quick peek at what I got for her family.  I love the trike one since it’s just a little too big, ha ha.  Good times!

I have so much to say about WPPI that I just don’t know where to begin.  Since this is the case, I will do what most people would do and that is to start at the beginning.  Mel and I had so much fun driving and being silly and reading to each other.  The drive took longer than we thought it would and it started getting pretty late.  We were driving from Reno to Vegas and there was a police officer in front of me.  He was fiddling with his spot lights and Mel (my sister) wondered what he was looking for.  Right as she thought that very thought, she looked to the side of the road and saw a car in the ditch.  She only saw a small portion of the car, though, because it was in a ditch.  She figured that was what the officer was looking for and insisted that I flash my lights to get his attention.  We flashed and flashed and flashed some more and finally the cop pulls over onto the side of the road and gets out to start walking toward us.  I leaned my head out the window and yelled, “Are you looking for a car in a ditch?”  And he says, “Yep, and it would be a lot easier to find it if you weren’t riding my tail and flashing your lights!!!”  I say, “well, we saw it about 50 yards back up the road.” and he said, “Well, what color was it?”  He said this very gruffly like he was very suspicious that we were up to no good.  I looked at Mel since she is the one who saw it and she said, “red” and he said, “Well, that is the color of the vehicle I am looking for.  You may pass me.”  That version is a little bit abridged for the sake of my fingers, but it was our first adventure.

Our second adventure was that we saw Jose Villa at the trade show!!!  Talk about fanfare!  It was all Mel and I could do not to run up to him screaming and pulling our hair out Beatles fan style.  Turns out that there are a bunch of photography celebrities at the convention, but not only is Jose Villa our favorite, but he also spoke to a small group at the Fuji booth for about half hour.  It was a total coincidence that we got to see him speak since there are about 10,000 photographers at the conference and the trade show is huge and we didn’t know he would even be there for that blip of time.  His words were so inspiring and I love that he follows his artistic sensibilities more than he follows a proper business sense.

We learned a ton researching the products shown there which was the whole point of going and we found out that we love White House Custom Colors lay flat books.  They were awesome and I will be ordering a sample soon!

In the evenings we hung out with Mel’s friends who live there and who we were staying with to save some moolah.  It was so fun to see the dancing water at the Bellagio.  The city was beautiful with the crisp cool air and blue sky.  The huge hotels on the strip laid the foreground of snow covered mountains in the distance.  Minus all the corruption of gambling and scantily clad posters everywhere downtown, it was an amazing place!

On the way home we had another crazy adventure.  It was the afternoon and we were going north on I-5 coming home when a man driving southbound fell asleep at the wheel and drove through the median and foggered (referencing the old atari game) through a bunch of northbound traffic (us) and over the highway through a fence and into the fruit tree of an apple orchard.  How do I know he fell asleep, you may wonder.  Well, when he hit the tree, we pulled over and Mel ran over to the car while I called 911.  He was dazed, but had no serious injuries and another woman who jumped out of her car to help turned out to be a trauma nurse.  It was so surreal to see this all happen right before my very eyes and also to know that the reality is that we could have been seriously injured if the man hadn’t been blessed enough to miss all the traffic.  It was a miracle!!

Here are some more pictures from my kids session last week.  I am playing with some new actions in photoshop.  They aren’t that different, but if you want to, let me know what you think.

I might be in a little over my head. This is how it all happened to become crazy. Since it is winter, the very slowest time of the year for my photography, I have been setting up a lot of practice sessions. That is where I call a friend or another photographer and ask if I can take some pictures of them. I get a lot of ideas rolling around in my brain and I like to try out new ideas without the pressure of having to please anyone else. Anyway, I have two such sessions today and very cleverly spaced them out so there would be plenty of time for both.

“Que the monkey wrench!”

Yesterday afternoon I get a phone call. The man sounds slightly paniced an wants to find out if I can do a photo session with his daughter, two dogs, and himself. It’s for his wife and it’s for Valantine’s day. Every part of me that actually respects my own time told me to tell him “no” and then I remembered that the whole reason I am working hard during the off winter season is to encourage people to pay me to do what I love and what I am good at, photography! Then I mentally slapped myself and said to myself, “Self! This is a real client! I know you aren’t used to getting them in the winter, but this is what it’s all about!” So I sqeezed him in.

This part is awesome, I love his request! He wants a quick group photo with the above mentioned people and then he needs it printed today. Here is what we firgured out. He comes over, we spends ten minutes getting a nice group shot, come to my office, I download the images, He picks his favorite, I get the selected image print ready and burn it to a disc, he goes to get it printed at a one hour photo place. All this while his wife is at the gym because he doesn’t want her to find out until he gives it to her. Is that sweet or what?

Because I don’t like the thought of having a 1-hour photo of my work displayed in anyones home, I intend to send a nice print to him in the usual 2-4 week print delivery time to replace the one-hour photo.

And now for WPPI!! I am so exited to say that Mel (my sister) and I are going on a road trip to Vegas! WPPI stands for Wedding & Portrait Photographers International. They host the largest photography convention in the US and they have the largest trade show for photographer vendors too. Mel and I leave on Monday and we will be back on Thursday. I plan to take lots of pictures and give a full report (a fun report) when I get back.

A little later………….

Okay, here are some images from the second session.  Happy Valentine’s Day!!!

I have often shyed away from family portrait session because I am not a traditional gal.  I was so excited to take pictures of Brenda’s family on a wet Saturday after in their lovely home.  Brenda was game for anything, and I mean anything!!  Her kids got to jump on the bed having pillow fights, race around the living room on each other’s shoulders, and have tickling wars on the couch.  Now THAT is what I am talkin about!  It was so much fun and I love what we got.