Favorite photos of 2009:

OK, so I know that we are already four days into 2010, but I just cant move on until I say goodbye to some of my favorite photos of 2009 and the stories behind the pictures:

Jesse and Lynne were married at Mountain Meadows Lodge in Killington and Alice the Potbellied pig and her friends mixed well with guests and were even invited by the bridal couple to attend the coctail hour! I couldnt stop laughing as Alice  made her way from guest to guest, wagging her tail and looking for food droppings!

How often do you get to photograph a granny being tattooed? Well, the tats were temporary and the event was Amy’s Bat Mitzvah at the Woodstock Inn:

I photographed this dog walker while out in San Francisco last Spring and it is definitely in my top five  faves of the year:

One of the best jobs I had all year was as the photographer  for Lyric Theatre’s “THE FULL MONTY” and while I shot hundreds of pictures, both on and off the stage, this one  is my favorite:

I am a HUGE fan of Indy singer/songwriter Sarah Bareilles and I was able to see her in concert in Boston last February. I couldnt help but bring along a camera:

Phil and Andrea were married in Capitola, California (a gorgeous oceanside town just south of Santa Cruz) at 12:34 pm and 56 seconds on July 8, 2009. If you break that down in numbers, that’s 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9!!! Pretty cool, huh? Well  Phil is an engineer, so it makes sense. Anyway, it was a gorgeous wedding and one of my faves of 2009:

While I am by no means a sports photographer, I spent a lot of time shooting the CVU Football team because both my sons play (James on Varsity and David on JV). This one is a saver (and they went on to win the game, too!):

I do many family portrait sessions but one of the most important of the year was of Carrie and Michael Premsager and their 2 beautiful kids. Carrie was scheduled for a very aggresive cancer surgery in Washington D.C. the following week and she wanted to have some beautiful family pictures to look at during the long recovery period. Carrie’s cancer is called Pseudomyxoma Peritonei and I am happy to report that the surgery was successful and seven months later she is doing great and she is CANCER FREE! .  To learn more about Carrie and her journey for life, please visit: tp://www.caringbridge.org/visit/carriepremsagar/mystory. 

Each summer, my family disappears for two weeks to our cabin on Blackstone Lake outside of Parry Sound, Ontario (about a 12-hr drive!) and each summer I sit perched with my camera trying to grab a shot of the elusive hummingbird that only seems to visit the feeder on the porch when the camera isnt handy! Well, this summer, I won! It only took nine years to get this photo, so it has to rank as one of my faves of the year!

On April 7,  Marriage equality passed when the Vermont Legislature voted to override the Governor’s veto. The final vote? 100-49. In the photo below, VT. Freedom To Marry’s Sherry Corbin, Atty. Beth Robinson, Atty. Susan Murray and Atty. Deb Lashman react as the Vote passed in the House..MARRIAGE EQUALITY– what a wonderful phrase!

 Following this vote, many events took place through the summer celebrating the new law. At an RU12 dinner, I grabbed this photo of Vt. State legislator David Zuckerman having some fun with a cutout display of the Governor (who had vetoed the original Freedom to Marry bill):

I loved this wedding at the Calvin Coolidge Homestead and the couple was lovely:

For a year I worked on a project, making portraits of  20 women who were interviewed  for a book exploring the diversity of Vermont Jewish culture. TO LIFE: A Celebration of Vermont Jewish Women, is now a book and a traveling exhibit, which began in November at the Gallery At The Brick Box on Center Street in downtown Rutland.

I shoot so many portraits, but the following two are my favorites-one environmental and one in the studio:

Next are some of favorite “kids-will-be-kids” moments from the wedding season:

And now some grown up wedding moments that I adore:

These last two weddings are especially important to me. The first is the wedding of a Chris and Helen, a great couple in Oregon, and the mother-of-the-bride is one of my oldest friends. I flew out to shoot what was planned as the perfect beach wedding on the sandy shore of Manzanita, Oregon.  But after a torrential rain storm blew down the tent and all hopes of that kind of celebration, the families banded together to reinvent the wedding at a nearby Methodist church. In the end, it was the perfect wedding. WHY? Because the couple was surrounded by love and support. And nothing else mattered:

The second wedding is a FIRST of its kind: At the stroke of midnight on September 1, 2009, Corey and Claire  were announced “married ” by Atty. Beth Robinson, chair of the Vermont Freedom to Marry Taskforce. It was the  first day that Vermont’s marriage equality law went into effect.  The ceremony took place at the couple’s South Burlington home in front of about twenty close friends and members of the Vermont media. Earlier in the day, we did the wedding portraits:

All in all, it was a truly “PICTURE PERFECT” 2009 and I thank all of my bridal couples and everyone else who I had the priviledge to photograph during the year. Here’s more in 2010!