Come see me at Grand America for the Bridal Extravaganza, this Saturday, January 3rd.  There will be tons of great wedding vendors there-florists, reception venues, cakes, dresses, and more-even some obscure stuff you never thought of having at your wedding.  You can get a free bride’s pass at www.utahbridalshows.com.  Come see me and get your plan on!

A special thank you to all my clients this year.  I had so much fun and fulfillment photographing you.  Thank you for putting your trust in me to document your most important moments.

I will be closed for the Christmas and New Year holidays from December 22nd-28th and December 31st and January 1st.  I’m off to Northern California for Christmas, where I grew up.  I’ll return your calls and emails when I return.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

I was at the fabric store, buying ribbon for wrapping Christmas gifts.  I was looking at wrapping paper for something good and different, but there wasn’t anything I liked.  I was browsing the store and saw a woman with a really cool tone on tone red-striped wrapping paper.  I asked her where she got it in the store.  She said it was the last one and I was a little disappointed, but it wasn’t a big deal since it’s just wrapping paper. 

I was in line to check out behind her later and when she was finished paying for her items, including the red-striped wrapping paper, she turned to me and said, “Here, I want you to have this, you liked it so much.”  I was taken aback and told her she didn’t need to do that.  She insisted and gave it to me and said, “Merry Christmas!”  I thanked her and was just so touched by that little gesture.  She could have just handed it to me before she paid for it, but she bought it and then gave it to me.  I guess it just hit her at that moment when she saw me in line behind her and she gave it to me.  It’s just wrapping paper, but the gesture was just so kind. 

Thank you, lady with the wrapping paper, wherever you are!

Jim and Dianne, my mother and father in-law, decided it was time for portraits of just the two of them, so we decided to head to the Salt Lake LDS Temple for their session.  They volunteer at the LDS Church History Museum, so we definitely had to do a few in front of the sign.  This was a fun little session on a brisk, windy day.  They used one of the shots for their Christmas card, too.  Oh, and the last one is for Jim.  He was in the Airforce and then, worked in air traffic control for the rest of his career.  He now teaches aviation classes at Utah State.  He has a thing for contrails, the trail airplanes leave behind in the sky.  Jim has lots of photos of contrails and he asked me to get one at the end of our session.  There you go, Jim!

Christmas card front:

Christmas card back:

Jim’s contrail:

By Utah portrait photographer, Melissa Kelsey Photography

This kid’s got personality and he shows it on his face.  Ashton (the kid), Terra (the mom), and Trent (the dad) and I went out for an urban chic style portrait session in downtown Salt Lake City.  From the moment I met Ashton, he was all smiles and full of bubbly fun.

Ashton shows me his shoes…

…and winks at me…

…and bends over backward, all on his own accord.

I swear I did not ask this little guy to do this pose.  He’s a natural.

Terra

Trent

Father and son

Crazy faces

…and another

The way kids run is awesome.  Their arms go in crazy circles, their legs are wild, and they don’t care how they look.  Did you ever see that “Friends” episode where Rachel was embarrassed to run with Pheobe in Central Park because she looked ridiculous?  Then, Rachel tried it and didn’t care what she looked like because it was so fun and free.  It’s like that.

My second shooter for weddings, Leisha and I  decided we wanted to put together a little “studio” shoot.  The brilliant thing about professional lighting and backdrops is that you can put them up anywhere and it looks like you’re in a a so-called studio.  Leisha has two adorable kids and my friend, Soozee, has two precious twin girls (who also happen to be my Goddaughters).  So, we got them all together at Soozee’s house and set up our lights and backdrop in Soozee’s living room.

It was quite the task trying to get three 2 year olds and one 4 year old to sit still for any length of time for photos, but we managed.  It was quite an  exausting experience, but I got these supercute portraits of them.

Kate was so easy.   She’s an old pro at this with her mom always taking photos of her.  She’s just a happy-go-lucky little person.

Landon, Kate’s brother, on the other hand, was not so happy about pictures.   I think his mom may have taken a few too many photos of him in his 4 years.    I did get some awesome crying shots, though!

On the floor in the final stages of his fit.

Look who’s all happy now!  Landon loved trying to shoot the bats out of my camera with the water gun (not loaded, thankfully).

Ella wasn’t too interested in having her portraits done.  She wanted to get to the other room to play with toys.  I was able to get some lovely quiet portraits of her.  She is sometimes quiet and comtemplative and sometimes so smiley and dancy.  This day, she was the former.

Ella does love to dance.  I love her bright outfit against the grey backdrop.

Georgia was fun, but hard to keep in one general area.  She loves to run around-a lot.

Georgia loves to dance when her favorite song comes on.

Here’s Kate again because she was so easy to photograph and was happy to just stay in one place.

Everyone was getting tired and hungry and kids were no longer interested in photos, so this noseless bear was the only subject who would stay still and happy for me.

Lunch time!

Everyone was happy again after lunch.  Time for some more photos with less clothes.

What do Britney Spears and I have in common?  We’re both in the January issue of Glamour Magazine!!!

You may remember Ty and Erin, a couple whose wedding I photographed in April.  

Well, Erin works in Public Relations/Marketing and got her little self in a Glamour story called, “Change Your Life in 31 Days”.  Ten women did one small thing every day for 31 days and reported on how it changed their lives.  Erin read all the front page stories of the Chicago Tribune every day.  She became more informed and could talk with authority on politics and current events.  What a great feeling and confidence booster!  

So, how did I get in Glamour Magazine?  Erin asked if I would photograph her reading the Chicago Tribune for the story and of course, I jumped at the possiblity of being in such a big publication.  So, Erin and Ty and I did a mini-session and here we are!

If you’d like to read the story, it starts on page 134 of Glamour and my photo of Erin is on page 139.  I will make the disclaimer that magazine printing does not do justice to photographs.  I feel better now.

www.glamour.com

I’m published!  The Wyofile, a Wyoming newspaper, asked if they could use one of my photos from a shoot I did for Maverik Country Stores last year.  My photo is the third one down on the page.  The article topic is really interesting, too!

Get E-Newsletter | Email Story | Printer-Friendly Version One in Nine: Wyoming’s Mormons. Star Valley’s Helen and Bill Call, Mormons Outside the Church 12/08/2008 By Tom Rea   Helen Call AFTON — Helen Call was in a church women’s relief society meeting one day when some of the other members objected to some of her pointed questions about the tenets of the Mormon faith. “People reacted very negatively,” she recalled recently. “I said to myself, well, I just don’t fit there anymore, and I just quit going.”    In 2000, Helen had joined 51 other Mormon women who signed a letter published in the Salt Lake Tribune opposing Mormon Church President and Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley’s statements about women in the church.      ”Mormon women are in a bind,” the letter said. “If we disagree we reap trouble; if we relent we lose our voice. When our leaders say they ‘hear no complaint’ it’s because they have intimidated women into silence and compliance. Few women will risk excommunication.”    The same year, Helen Call’s husband, former Maverik Country Stores president and CEO William “Bill” Call, published a book that questioned what he called the “absolutism” of the Salt Lake City church leadership. Not long after that, he was excommunicated.    Both Helen and Bill Call come from prominent Star Valley families descended from polygamous Mormon pioneers.   The Call’s Family Home    The Calls are one of the most successful — and unconventional –couples in Star Valley. In terms of family history and service to the community, two standards that are very important in church culture and teachings, few people in the Star Valley can top the Calls, who live in an ultra-modern, glass fronted home — with an attached music studio for Bill– on the outskirts of Afton. Though they are no longer part of the church, no profile of the Star Valley Mormons would be complete without them.      After her eight children were grown, Helen went to work for Lincoln County Public Health as a childbirth coach and later a specialist in breast feeding. She also served 12 years on the board of the Star Valley Hospital and still does a great deal, quietly, her friend Laura Lechner told me, for the women of Star Valley.      From 1983 to 1999, Bill Call served as president and CEO of the Afton-based Maverik Country Stores, now a billion-dollar-a-year-company with 190 gas station/convenience stores across the mountain west.    He also holds a doctorate of music arts degree from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, has composed three operas and four symphonies, and has written several books on theology. The ideas in the second of those books, The Cultural Revolution: From the Decay of a Dying World Comes the Birth of a New Age, published in 2000, got him excommunicated two years later from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Photo Credit: Melissa Kelsey The Maverik Country Store dynasty But the excommunication, the highest form of censure the church has, was the culmination of two decades of questioning and writings about their faith that led to the Calls’ break with the church.    Helen stopped going to church first. As much as anything, she said, it was a kind of intellectual complacency she found everywhere in Mormonism that drove her away from it.      ”My mother said to me one day, ‘You never question the gospel.’ But I found myself wanting to question things — why this and why that.    ”I didn’t want to be rebellious. I just wanted to be an individual.”    Helen and Bill both grew up in Star Valley. She was a Burton and her mother was a Field, important families that trace their lines to the valley’s original, polygamous pioneers. The two got to know each other, however, at Brigham Young University. Bill had recently returned from a mission to Mexico. They married for time and all eternity in the temple in Salt Lake City when she was 19 and he 23. She had finished one year at BYU. After the children began to come she took more classes, but never graduated. A friend told her not to worry, that she was “too serious about school” anyway.   Bill Call    Bill acquired bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music at BYU, before the couple moved to Illinois for his doctorate. He finished the coursework in 1968, and got the degree in 1971. Meanwhile, they had moved to Banning, California, where Bill’s father, Maverik founder Reuel Call, had bought a plot of land and was planning to build an oil refinery.   The refinery never materialized, though the company did open a filling station in nearby Palm Springs.    After less than a year in California, Bill and Helen moved back to Afton, and concentrated on family and business life.    As the years went by and Helen and Bill gradually felt more estranged from the church, their eight children reacted differently.    ”It was a real shakeup for some of the kids,” Helen said. She clearly remembers nursing a baby the day in the early 1980s that Clayton, their second son, about seventeen and very upset, came to her with questions about her belief. She describes Clayton as “a very philosophical, thinking person.”    ”Your children have free agency” in Mormon life, she said. But parents may fear that, behind their backs, their children will turn away from the church. They worry, ” ‘will I have them with me for eternity?’ “ Helen said. (Families of the faithful stay together in the afterlife.)    After talking with his mother, Clayton “went to visit with Bill and they talked for 15 or 20 minutes. And he got it,” she said. The boy, after listening closely, understood his father’s point of view. Sometimes, after moments like that in people’s lives, “things are never the same,” Helen Call said.    About three years later, Bill remembers, Clayton was preparing to go on a mission to Brazil. As is customary, the young man was slated to be celebrated at a church meeting– a special service at the ward house — before he left.      Usually the missionary’s parents speak at such events, along with others close to the family, followed by the about-to-be missionary. All remarks together might take up half or three quarters of an hour.    But Bill found he had a lot to say that day, and spoke for 30 minutes straight.    ”It upset people,” Helen said. Clayton then spoke for five or ten minutes.    Bill’s remarks eventually became the basis for his first book. Clayton, meanwhile, spent three weeks at the LDS missionary training center before he realized he was not cut out for the work. He came home, and never went to Brazil.      The Trial of Faith: Discussions Concerning Mormonism and Neo-Mormonism, was published in 1986. Bill Call was in his mid-forties at the time, most of the children were still at home, and he still sees it as a book about a man and his family. In The Trial, a man gives a talk at a church meeting, going beyond what was normally acceptable there. The stake president tells him a kind of church trial is likely to result. As the trial approaches, the man engages in long conversations with a friend. The book is in the form of a dialog.    Bill still doesn’t see the book as anti-church, but understood then and since that it was “on the edge of what the church finds appropriate.”      It had little circulation, however. Bill’s older brother, Larry Call, stake president at the time, received some complaints about the book but never did much, Bill said. What little controversy there might have been died quickly away.    Around the time Helen left the church, Bill found he had so many problems with what he was expected to teach, in his capacity as instructor of the men in the church, that he couldn’t do it any longer. He no longer enjoyed directing the choir, either. “The things I’d had in common with the church, they changed,” he said.      Finally, Helen asked Bill why he kept going to church if his questions kept causing such unease. It wasn’t that she was trying to dissuade him, she said; she was genuinely curious about the answer. But after that, he quit going, too.    ”Before I quit I hardly ever missed a meeting. The day I stopped I never went again,” he said.      In 2000, he published his second book, The Cultural Revolution: From the Decay of a Dying World Comes the Birth of a New Age. This book traces the changes in western thinking from absolutism to pluralism over the last 500 years or so, Bill said. At the same time it points out that the Mormon church has gone essentially the opposite direction in its brief 178 years.   The church worldwide is now growing so fast, he said, that out of necessity it’s become far more centralized, regimented, and disciplined, especially in how it promulgates doctrine and trains its missionaries.      Power is so centralized that “things can be decided definitely and fast,” he said. But the church leadership is old, and often out of touch with its younger members, he said.    ”My intent was to be critical in a positive way,” he said. His intent was to criticize the general authorities, as the LDS leadership bureaucracy in Salt Lake City is called. He meant no criticism of the church at home, in Star Valley.    Still, local church authorities felt they could no longer ignore his thinking. And criticism in general is suspect in the Mormon Church, he said.    ”The general attitude of the church is, you don’t say anything, period.” Criticism threatens the faith of anyone who might be struggling, he said, and therefore the church makes no room for it.    He was excommunicated.    Bill was asked to meet with the leadership of the Star Valley Stake. This meant the president, his top two counselors, twelve more high councilmen, and the bishop of his ward, many of them men had known well for years.    Bill says now that he welcomed the close attention to his ideas. They quoted him passages from the book that they found theologically unacceptable.    ”Rather than back down, I’d take them to a place in the book where the same point was made even stronger,” he said.    Excommunications up to the 1980s were much more high profile than they are now, he said. But because this event was so low-key, and because Helen and Bill already had not been going to church for five years or more, it caused hardly a ripple in Star Valley’s Mormon community.       Excommunications are supposedly confidential, though Bill and Helen figure that with 15 or 20 people at the meeting its outcome was hardly a secret. Still, they said no one’s ever asked them about it, or made them feel shunned or unwelcome, including Bill’s older brothers Larry and Val Call, both of them former stake presidents.    Around the time of the excommunication, Bill also left the company. The Wall Street Journal reported he sold his Maverik interests for $6 million.    ”It was a falling out between my brothers and myself. … I was the younger brother and I was in charge of the company,” he said, and that was a problem.    Helen was not excommunicated.    ”I wasn’t,” she said, “because I didn’t write a book and go out and say things to people.”    And Mormon home teachers still come to the house each month. Every Mormon home is visited each month by men from the priesthood and women from the relief society.       ”I’m not a member, so they can’t visit me,” Bill said. “But because Helen is a member it’s very loose, and people are very friendly.” The subject of Bill’s excommunication never comes up — though Bill knows one of the teachers knows about it, because he was present at the final meeting.    ”It’s a nice system,” Helen said. “A ward is kind of like a family … every time the teacher leaves he says, ‘Anything you need, you let me know.’ And I know he means it.”      Bill said they both still consider themselves Mormon, in a cultural and lifestyle sense.    ”The organization is very good,” Helen said. “If people need help you can get it very fast. And the culture is helpful, as long as you fit into it.”    And Helen and Bill keep questioning — together. “We get these videotapes from The Teaching Company,” which publishes college-level lectures and the like, she said. “We fix a nice dinner, watch these lectures, and we have a discussion.    ”It’s intriguing to really look at something. What does a baby do? Look things over, very closely. You need to do that with life,” Helen Call said.

These Tuesday tips sure have a way of sneaking up on me!  I was reminded of this tip from the wedding I photographed on Saturday.

DECORATING THE BRIDE AND GROOM’S CAR

First, off-do it!  I love fun photographs of the bridal party decorating the car-make sure you tell me it’s going on so I can photograph you in action.

However, the most important thing to remember is:

NO SHAVING CREAM!!!

Shaving cream is bad for the paint.  Bad for the paint is bad for you because your friend might get really mad.

Okay, so I know this is supposed to be the Friday Randomness post about me and my life, kooky stuff-random stuff, but this is more important.  Tomorrow is the big designer gown sale dayat Alta Moda!  Don’t forget, you need to call to make an appointment.  Go on…do it…I’ll wait.  801-531-1215.  Oh, and don’t forget to tell them I sent you, so they’ll love me.  Thanks.

Here’s the scoop in case you missed it last time I posted it:

Awesome once a year only, one day only sale at Alta Moda.  Hilary, the co-owner of Alta Moda let me in on this juicy tidbit. 

Alta Moda is known for high end designer gowns and they are having a sample sale!  Get your dream gown from 50% to 80% OFF!  Please be sure to make an appointment to see the dresses because if you don’t, the fabulous folks at Alta Moda won’t be able to give you the attention you deserve.  It’s sure to be a madhouse, so get your appointment soon for the best possible selection.  (And, tell them I sent you!)

*December 6th from 10am – 6 pm
*Appointments HIGHLY preferred
*Couture samples from Monique Lhuillier, Anne Barge, Atelier Aimee, Amy Michelson, Melissa Sweet, Augusta Jones, Alvina Valenta and others.
*Over 40 gowns included
*All sale gowns discounted between 50% and 80%.  (Yes, I am serious.)

Alta MODA Bridal                    www.altamodabridal.com                                                                                                                                            637 E. 500 S.
Located just north of Trolley Square
Salt Lake City, Utah
Appointment Preferred

And this is one of the actual dresses!  To die for.