Graffiti and Melanie

I woke up this morning and was happy to see another sun filled blue sky. I briefly mentioned the other day having made plans to do a modeling type portrait session with my friend, Melanie. We met up a little bit after the lunch hour and set out to take full advantage of another great day weather wise. I'd been brainstorming ideas the past couple of days as we made our plans to get together, and decided I wanted to go back to this area in NW Champaign with several overpasses that are covered in graffiti. I went there to shoot engagement photos for my friends last week, and thought it might be an easy place to ease myself into the idea of portrait photography. Looking at the photos you'd figure it to be a pretty sketchy area for the two of us to be out taking photos, but this is actually adjacent to a really nice park, and there was a trail where people were walking their dogs and jogging right by us. Lucky for me, the graffiti and Melanie did all the work, so my first attempt at modeling was pretty easy. Melanie is obviously a pretty girl to begin with which makes things easy, but she was picking out photo locations left and right and then striking the pose all on her own, so it's hard for me to take any of the credit on what I think what a pretty good first outing. She and I both have other ideas that we're eager to put to work in coming months too, so hopefully here's to a little variety from the wind farms and star trails as we head back toward the spring.

Here's a link to the entire flickr set.