My mission is to create an album from the pictures of our trip to India last year. Personal projects have taken a backseat and I finally got inspired to work on them for the blog carousel with some talented photographer friends this month. The theme is “texture” and with my love of all things old I thought I would work on one of the images from this series. The series was photographed at Cafe Britannia in Mumbai. Britannia is a popular Irani restaurant located in an charming business neighborhood in the city. I loved this place with its paint-peeling walls, vaulted ceilings, homey atmosphere, and most of all the adorable 88 year old owner Boman Irani that came around to chat with the patrons at the restaurant. He had a story to tell and share pictures from the days of the British in India to a letter from Queen Elizabeth. And his son, Afshin was kind enough to let me take photos thanks to my brother Abodh’s connection with him.

Only the top image has a texture play (as it takes some time to manipulate the image). The image is compiled with a couple of textures I photographed in India as well and manipulated in Photoshop. I thought the story wouldn’t be complete if I only posted a single image and the images are so rich with texture even without my play on it. Besides it got me working on the rest of the images for the album. At the bottom of the post I will share the textures used for the image above. Back the carousel entries…be sure to journey on to the next carousel entry by Corey, Atlanta children’s photographer.

Boman Irani holding paper with Queen Elizabeth story

Below are the two textures used in creating the first image in this post. If you would like to play with them yourself, drop me a line with your email and I will send them your way! One of my favorites textured images is this holiday card from last year.

There was a lot of anticipation for this family photo session that mama booked months back scheduled to work around my New York trip in late September. Murphy’s law prevailed and it turned out to be a wet, cold week in the duration of my stay out there. I don’t think I have ever checked the weather channel to the extent I did hoping to catch one of the better day/times for their shoot. The family was willing to be flexible and stayed on-call to let me pick the best day/time. We did their shoot on a pretty overcast day expecting rain the next day. Even with our dreary weather, the family persevered and we had lots of fun together. Their six year old daughter was quite the mama’s girl and almost year old baby boy was daddy’s boy. Perfect, to have one of each. It was wonderful to capture their connections and spend time hanging out. Such a wonderful treat to meet his lovely family! So grateful that my job gives me these wonderful opportunities to meet good people.

making new friends…

We stopped by this teeny beautiful church. It was closed but the groundskeeper was nice enough to open it for us.

Aside from the crazy weather, I got to meet some amazing families from NY and work with them in a fun urban scape quite different from the San Francisco backdrop.

Meet Jack and his two friends. Sweet little Jack came with a whole bunch of fun stuff for the shoot (or his mom and her friend did). They even got some fall leaves that the kids got to toss around in the air- how fun is that!