WILLIAMSBURG — Taylor Kennedy got her first camera as a child — then her hobby turned into a career as a professional photographer.

“When my Pop bought me my first camera, he put my biggest passion and my entire career in my hands at just 10 years old. I had no idea I’d be doing this as a career, it was ‘just a hobby’ at the time,” Kennedy said.

Taken by Taylor has been an “official” community business for close to four years.

Kennedy had provided photo sessions for close friends over the years, and while she was on maternity leave from her former job, she thought using her camera skills to make “a few extra bucks” sounded like a good idea.

“I decided to really start pushing for photo sessions and had way more support from the community than I anticipated, so I decided to quit my 9-to-5 and jumped in full-time.”

Kennedy says that capturing people in ways that reflect them authentically and naturally is the key to her success.

“Anyone can dress up in pretty clothes and take a picture, but not every family can be yours. I love how each and every session is unique, I love seeing how full hearts can be even if there’s a little chaos mixed in. It’s the genuine moments, the raw emotions, the true and real ‘now.’”

“I want you to not only look your best but also feel like yourself,” she added

And photography is a lot more than just being able to use a camera, explains Kennedy. Her skills as a stylist, lighting tech, location advisor and editor are all an important part of her process.

A native of Williamsburg, Kennedy says the area makes the perfect natural backdrop for any group or event. She even prides herself on knowing some ‘super secret’ local spots to take the perfect shots.

“I love meeting new people in this area and I love how strong and close the community is. I love how clean it is here and the pride the community takes in their own town. It’s the perfect place.”

Kennedy understands costs can be prohibitive when choosing a photographer.

To that end, Taken by Taylor recently lowered prices and readjusted its packages to reflect current client demand, but Kennedy said that won’t change her approach when it comes to quality or work ethic.

“I believe my customer service stands out a lot from other businesses. I go above and beyond to make sure my clients go into their photo session knowing what to expect, what to wear and how to overall prepare for session,” explained Kennedy. “I genuinely care about each and every person that contacts me, even if they don’t end up booking with me. A lot of my clients like how relaxed and natural my family sessions turn out.”

Family sessions, maternity sessions, newborn sessions and weddings make up most of the Taken by Taylor clientele.

“I want nothing more than to capture memories to be passed down for generations.” Kennedy continued, “Nothing makes me feel the way I feel when I capture someone’s ‘first,’ or maybe someone’s ‘last.’”

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Join us for an insightful discussion with Moksha Patel, an internal medicine physician, as we explore the fascinating parallels between clinical reasoning and photography. Moksha shares how principles like focus, zoom, and flash in photography can enhance medical practice, offering unique perspectives on diagnosis, patient care, and maintaining the human connection amidst the demands of modern medicine. Discover how cross-disciplinary skills can enrich clinical reasoning and why creative pursuits outside of medicine are crucial for clinicians.

Moksha Patel is an internal medicine physician.

He discusses the KevinMD article, “How photography made me a better doctor.”

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HARRISONBURG, Va. (WHSV) – Photographing crime scenes has become a strong skill for Jonathan Snoddy, Harrisonburg Police Department’s lead evidence technician, in the past 14 years. He said his work has become his passion, and now he takes it with him off the clock.

“I started getting some professional gear and really got into it. So, I took what I used on crime scenes for my job and I kind of funneled that into a passion for travel and documenting my travels,” Snoddy said. “The crime scene stuff is a job and I know how to do it. I do it pretty well. But my passion is going out into the field and capturing things of beauty, as opposed to what I normally see in this line of work.”

Snoddy said he grew up traveling around the United States with his family, but it wasn’t until after he and his wife got married that he would begin venturing outside the country.

“I think the first trip out was Belize, and that was it,” Snoddy said. “We went out there, and it was so amazing to see other cultures. Ever since then, we’ve just kind of gone wherever we wanted to and really enjoyed it.”

The passion for traveling and photography only continued to grow after the trip, as Snoddy would eventually visit 21 countries. He said photographing places around the world has allowed him to find peace away from the crime scenes at work.

“I think going out and exposing myself to other cultures and really seeing how other people live gives me perspective, and I just enjoy seeing that side of life. There’s more outside of just the darkness that I see in my job,” Snoddy said. “We’ll be going to Japan in the fall and just getting some new images — just always trying to improve get new stuff … That’s kind of how I unwind, so [I’m] always looking forward to the next trip.”

Snoddy said he hopes to continue his passion for photography when he is ready to retire from the police department and possibly use what he has learned toward future endeavors.

“I’d love to transition to full-time photography. That is my passion. I’m not too sure if the market is too saturated with photographers to actually make a career out of it, but I would love to do that,” Snoddy said. “With having all the crime scene experience, maybe I could transition to teaching classes on that — passing on what I’ve learned in my years here to people who are just getting into the field.”

Snoddy’s work is on display at Harrisonburg City Hall on Friday from 5-7 p.m. For the event, visitors are able to come see his work, meet the artist and purchase some of the pieces for themselves. The work will be on display for the rest of the month with visitors still able to purchase his work on his website.

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Onassis Arroyo is a local avid bird photographer enthusiast who regularly photographs birds and other wildlife in the Yucaipa area. He is especially drawn to a pair of bald eagles, one with a band on its leg, who are often together near the Crafton Hills area.

“From 2021-2024, I made it my quest to try and capture the numbers on the banded female eagle in my photographs. Over time I have collected hundreds of images of the banded eagle,” said Arroyo.

Arroyo updated his camera with additional megapixels to assist with the undertaking of gathering numbers on the banded eagle.

Recently, local photographer Tony Lumsden gave his friend, Arroyo the missing puzzle piece with an image that include the missing numbers on the banded eagle for identification purposes.

“I typed in the band numbers on www.reportband.gov. an integrated scientific program that supports data from banded and marked birds, and I had a hit!” said Arroyo.

“It was great to help a friend with the missing puzzle piece. It has been a fun adventure,” said Lumsden.

Subsequently, Arroyo was contacted by Nicollett Overby, who is a Banding Data Specialist for Bloom Biological.

“The band was placed on the Bald Eagle as a chick near Ramona, San Diego County in 2014,” said Overby.

“This is an exciting encounter as we have never had any previous resights of this individual eagle, and Arroyo was able to obtain the full band number almost exactly 10 years after it was banded as a chick in the nest near the town of Ramona in San Diego County,” said Overby.

“I was thrilled to learn the history of the female eagle and how far she traveled,” said Arroyo. Overby manages banding data for Dr. Peter Bloom. The data goes back to the 1970s. Zoologist Dr. Peter Bloom is an internationally acclaimed raptor biologist and founder of Bloom Research. He has spent four decades studying, banding, tracking hawks, eagles, kites, condors and owls. He works with landowners and the regulatory agencies in conserving their habit.

Dr. Bloom and his colleagues have captured nearly 850 golden eagles and more than 54,000 other types of birds, in a quest to learn more about the importance of natal dispersal, philopatry, movements, and unique migration pattern as they relate to conservation biology, according to Bloom Research, INC.

Bloom and his sub-permittees have banded over 50,000 birds (mostly in California) since 1970. We rely on citizen scientists to help us by reporting the bands and tags encountered in North America, while giving the eagles space while photographing them.

“Citizen banding encounters become an important data point for research into natal dispersal and other movements,” said Overby.

For more information visit the U.S. Geological Survey at www.usgs.gov. Additionally, citizens can report bird banding observations at www.reportband.gov.

The UNT CoLab hosted a book signing for 72-year-old film photographer Richard Doherty on June 27 to celebrate the release of his book “Framing Oak Cliff: A Visual Diary from a Dallas Neighborhood.”

Doherty’s book, published by the University of North Texas Press, features three collaboration essays and his photographs capturing the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff, where he has lived for over 40 years. 

“I’d make portraits of people I met on the street, I’d make portraits of neighbors, I photographed my family in the book because the work really is personal and it’s about my vision of these places and these people and my representation of them,” Doherty said.

Doherty presented all 116 monochrome photos featured in the book at the event and explained the stories and his reasoning behind photographing them.

The photographs in Doherty’s book range from 1983, when he moved to the neighborhood, to 2022 and capture the history of Oak Cliff in a “visual diary” of the neighborhood.

“After seeing his work, I’m now seeing how hard photographing a neighborhood like Oak Cliff has been,” university alum and film photographer Don Tortellini said. “The community has changed over time and the approach to photographing over time [has changed], and people are a lot more reserved to having their photo taken so it’s a lot harder to photograph and capture those images.”

Doherty said he chose to move to Oak Cliff after being offered a professorship at Tarrant County College because he was attracted to the diversity and uniqueness of the neighborhood.

“I’ve lived in [Oak Cliff] for 42 years, same house,” Doherty said. “I’ve always been committed to the neighborhood, to the community, to this place and they will carry me out of this house feet first. I really love it, and I love my community.”

The passion for one’s local area is shared by UNT CoLab Administrative Coordinator and instant film photographer John Eric Muñoz, who similarly photographs Denton through his project Instant Denton.

“I would think that if you didn’t enjoy living in the place that you were in, you wouldn’t take the time to get out and photograph it,” Muñoz said. “I’m excited to see how that comes through in his work and his love for Dallas or Oak Cliff specifically.”

Most of Doherty’s photographs are shot at eye level or lower with a wide-angle lens because he prefers the perspective it provides and the “starkly visual” black and white photos offer.

“I like it because it’s graphic and makes the viewer concentrate on the formal aspects of the frame as opposed to the pretty colors,” Doherty said. “It’s more about the texture, the line, the shape, the form the image takes on rather than the distracting element of color.”

The three essays featured in the book are written by best-selling author Bill Minutaglio, curator John Rohrbach of the Amon Carter Museum and curator Christopher Blay of the Houston Museum of African American Culture.

Each essay would describe either Doherty’s photography or the history behind Oak Cliff. Minutaglio wrote a 5000-word essay on the history of Oak Cliff.

“For me, it’s incredible because it frames the landscape that I’ve worked in all these years and it gives people the historical background and the sociological background of this unique part of the city,” Doherty said. “It’s always been more ethnically, racially and economically diverse than any other section of this city, and he talks about that.”

Doherty only wrote his book’s preface and introduction, but is grateful for the three writers who contributed their essays to it.

“They were very generous to help out because all these people, all three of them, are gifted writers and very perceptive viewers,” Doherty said. “Especially Chris Blay, who is also a visual artist.”

Reflecting on Doherty’s work, Tortellini shared his admiration and respect for someone who’s work came before him.

“I think that Richard has done a great job in his career and I think his work is definitely necessary,” Tortellini said. “I believe his work is timeless and it speaks to his specific experience in Oak Cliff.”

Doherty continues photographing the world around him with a handheld camera and wants to leave his work behind to document time through his eyes.

“I just hope people will look at it and see the beauty in the simplicity that they’re surrounded with,” Doherty said. “Most people walk by stuff and don’t pay attention, and I just hope to bring attention to things people don’t usually pay much mind to.”

With no fireworks allowed on the space station, NASA astronauts improvised with camera flashes to celebrate Independence Day.

International Space Station (ISS) astronaut Matthew Dominick played around with “light painting” — a long exposure in a dark room that illuminates a subject with a light source — during Expedition 71’s time off to celebrate the Fourth of July.

“No fireworks on ISS so we used camera flashes instead. Experimented with ‘light painting’ today,” Dominick wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Dominick has already been practicing image time-lapses on the orbiting complex in between his regular duties, capturing stunning pictures of Earth and the space station in motion. But for the U.S. holiday, the NASA astronaut mounted the Stars and Stripes to the back of the Japanese Kibo module and played around with interior exposures. Then he posted the results on social media.

Two of the photos show Dominick skittering across Kibo in different ways — one with him zooming through the shot like a superhero, and another one catching him in more of a space tumble. The grin on his face is infectious.

Related: NASA astronauts send Fourth of July message to Earth from ISS (video)

Dominick described how the time-lapses were staged: “Turned off the lights. Manually actuated our own flashes. Ambient light only from computers and experiment LEDs.” He also added some photography stats, for aspiring space photographers: 15-second exposures, f22, 24mm, ISO 500.

For one photo, he got much of the Expedition 71 long-duration crew and the two Boeing Starliner astronauts (in space for a shorter mission) to join him in Kibo. Each astronaut used their own light source to illuminate themselves in the semi-darkness of the research facility.

The group was instructed to “fire your own flash at will, inside the 15 second exposure of course,” Dominick explained in a reply about how they staged it.

While Dominick is using his spare time to play with photos in fun, all astronauts are trained in orbital photography to assist with vital Earth observations during their time in space.

“Astronauts often take beautiful pictures of the aurora borealis, city lights at night, and the horizon, but they can also photograph natural hazards such as volcanic eruptions and wildfires from space,” NASA officials wrote in 2021. (More recently, for example, Expedition 71 has been capturing pictures of Hurricane Beryl from space.)

“In fact, astronaut photography can play a crucial role in helping scientists and decision makers monitor hazards in near real-time,” the NASA posting added. “While most traditional satellites only take photos looking straight down at the Earth, astronauts can capture images from a variety of perspectives.”

Some collect stamps. Others collect Panini stickers or doll figurines. Matthieu Nicol, on the other hand, collects images. The 45-year-old Frenchman, a former press image editor and web designer, spends whole days online, searching for fascinating photographs. These are not paper prints, but digital files that he stores on hard disks and in the cloud. For hours on end, he rummages through visual banks and archive collections, looking for surprising shots.

For several years now, he has been fascinated by the photo collections of major American institutions such as NASA and the Library of Congress. These images are made available to all, following the example of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s Gallica accessible platform. “We’re sitting on a gold mine,” said Nicol, with a smile.

In 2022, he struck gold: the Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center (DEVCOM), formerly known as the Natick Soldier Systems Center, named after its headquarters in Natick, Massachusetts. This US Army entity, largely unknown to the general public, is tasked with logistics, designing food rations, uniforms, shelters, tents and everything else that supports soldiers’ daily lives, both in the field and in the barracks. “It’s a kind of laboratory, where the working and living conditions of an entire society – hundreds of thousands of people in the army – are invented,” explained Nicol.

‘Fashion Army’

In the early 2020s, a collection of 14,000 photos from the center’s archives was declassified. Obsessed with culinary imagery, to the point of creating a much-followed Instagram account (@vintage_food_photography) filled with images of pies, mayonnaise-climbing shrimp and meat jelly, Nicol selected gastronomy-related images from this treasure trove. His book, Better Food For Our Fighting Men, was published in 2022 and reissued in March by RVB Books.

This summer, at the Rencontres d’Arles, he presents the second part of this work, “Fashion Army,” devoted this time to clothing. The collection includes camouflage jackets, night-vision goggles and bulletproof vests. But it also includes maternity wear, underwear, gold shorts, connected clothing and fabrics for extreme temperatures. The compilation has been published by SPBH Editions, on glossy paper with a soft cover, like a fashion magazine.

“We don’t know what these images were used for. We know they were produced between the 1960s and 1990s, from the end of the Vietnam War to the first Gulf War. But what they were used for is a mystery. Internal catalog? Documentation for engineers? Something else?” The US Army’s communications department gave him the cold shoulder. The only certainty is that the images were for internal use, not for publicity purposes. Their declassification indicates that they are now obsolete.

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This month we have another amazing issue for you, featuring professional tips, reviews, and practical how-to guides. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s inside!

Shoot fairytale macro photos brimming with detail and colour

Macro photography is a truly magical medium. It allows us to see the world in a completely new way, revealing details we never knew existed. In our main feature this month, we’re joined by two expert instructors, Ross Hoddinott and Catherine Régnier, who explain how to find and photograph closeup subjects creatively. Find out how to craft the perfect background for your macro studies, develop new lighting techniques and master the delicate art of fieldcraft. 

Shoot with just one lens

In our second feature of the issue, we delve into the world of lenses, in particular, how to shoot using a single optic. It’s easy to think that buying more lenses is a route to better images, however, this isn’t always practical and if you’re on a budget it might not be possible. Discover how our guest professional photographers choose and use their lenses to their maximum capacity, learning to get the most value from any type. Save money and get better shots with improved composition in the process.

The Danger Zone – master tough shoots!

Our Shoot Like a Pro feature in this issue is an exciting one. We joined photographer, Jon Parker Lee for an industrial commercial shoot in a quarry in the Peak District to learn how he manages complex briefs, directs large shoots and works in potentially high-risk locations. The pressure is on to capture the essential images for his client, with millions of pounds and many livelihoods at stake, so come along and go behind the scenes of this fascinating photoshoot. 

Add flash to your landscape shoots

Have you ever used flash in your landscape photography? If you answered no, you won’t be alone. In our creative project, we reveal how a speedlight can be the perfect tool for adding colour and detail to your scenic shots and can even apply a stunning sunset effect to your photos. Fill in the shadows, add sparkle to foregrounds and even add sunlight to your scenic shots!

Explore Tokyo with Richard Koek

Richard Koek has spent years exploring the world with his camera and, in this month’s interview slot, he explains why he wanted to capture Tokyo, one of the world’s biggest cities, in a unique way. Dive in to find out how Richard gained special access to a Sumo Stable, captured the people and explored Tokyo to reveal Japanese culture as you’ve never seen it before, going beyond the tourist’s view.

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Has it been a while since you last did a photography challenge? Here’s one that you can do over the weekend to put your photography skills to the test and refill your creative juices! For the 27th week of their 52-week Photo Challenge, the folks of SlickPic want us to look around for eye-catching Center Composition.

In this challenge, the task is to create photos that demonstrate the pleasing qualities of center composition: focused, simple, and symmetrical. This composition works for most photography genres, and is one of the most commonly used techniques. So part of the challenge is to think out of the box, get creative about it, and avoid cliche images.

To help inspire you with some tips and ideas, we suggest checking out these useful guides from Digital Photography School and Photo Life. In case you’re just joining, we also encourage you to check out the full info on the 52-week Challenge.

Photography challenge details

• Submissions will be accepted until the end of the day on July 7, 2024. So, if you’re in the mood to flex your creative muscles, there’s still plenty of time to make something nice!
• Submit 3 images by clicking this link
• Please submit images in JPEG format. To ensure the highest quality, it’s recommended to upload photos that are at least 2500 on the long side.

Once you submit your photos, you can review them here: https://52weekchallenge.slickpic.com

As always, you can ask your friends to join the challenge as well by clicking on the Share button for the album and inviting them to join in. Of course, you can also encourage them to Like and Comment on your submissions!

Submit your Center Composition photos now!