Pardon Our Dust...

If you've made it to this location on the World Wide Web...forgive us as we overhaul our website this weekend and republish our blog. If you've ever been through this process, you'll understand that things never work the way you anticipate...just gotta keep moving things around on the server till we get it right. Everything should be in order by Monday, March 31, 2008.

My Hero: Sandra Day O'Connor

One of the institutions I have the pleasure of working with is the College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, VA.

These days, former Supreme Court Associate Justice, Sandra Day O'Connor is the serving as Chancellor for W&M.

She attended the annual Charter Day festivities this year, and I was asked to cover the celebratory, black-tie dinner at the end of the day. This was the second time I'd had the opportunity to photograph her on the college campus. And this time, just like before, I was totally star-struck.

The image above is my favorite picture of her from that night. We have lots of shots of her delivering a speech and doing the formal things on the agenda...but those look as you would expect. At this point, former W&M President, Gene Nichol was at the lectern, and he must have made some jovial remark which made her laugh. Lovely.

She really was the classiest dame in the room...and fell for her. When the event was over, I saw her talking with Harriet Mayor Fulbright (president of the J. William & Harriett Fulbright Center).

Seeing these two amazing women together was really powerful; the Supreme Court Judge and the world peace advocate. I just had to document what appeared to be a warm friendship. With my photojournalist hat on, I followed O'Connor and Fulbright out of the banquet hall, got ahead of them, turned around and walked backwards hoping I wouldn't knock down one of the other guests as I made pictures.

Just after I got this shot, O'Connor said "That's quite enough now." Her words were like a laser beam: delivered with a smile and complete seriousness. It was a little taste of what it might have been like to argue a case before her.

Instantly, I stopped shooting, and scooted back into the ballroom to photograph the other guests.

Eat In Kitchen

Here's another one of Perry DesJardins' killer kitchens. This was shot during a day and half of image capture at a custom-built DesJardin home in Goochland County, VA.

Deciding what to leave in was the challenge in this shot. The home owner, like most of us, had all sorts of tchotchkes around the kitchen (with all that counter space, wouldn't you?)

But since I was shooting for the builder, we needed minimal distractions. The marble counter tops, custom cabinets, tile back splashes, lighting, etc., needed to be the stars of the show.

So I set up the tripod, framed the shot, and asked my assistant, Karin, to start removing items one by one. The challenge was for her to remove the cookbooks, decorative plates, potted plants, etc., and stow them in such a way that she could put them back just as she found them, so the homeowner would find the kitchen just as she left it.

The lighting is a combination of window light (provided by floor to ceiling french doors) in the out-of-the-frame family room to the right of the camera, and the tungsten lighting within the kitchen. Several bracketed exposures were sandwiched together in post-production to achieve this final image.

We're pleased with the final result...there are just enough decorative details in this kitchen to make it pretty, without being distracting to the overall design.

All images & text copyright 2008 Elaine Odell/Church Hill Photography, LLC.

Protesting High Gas Prices

Last week, while driving through rural Nelson County, we blew past this gas station on Rt. 664 in the hamlet of Beech Grove, a few miles down the mountain from the Wintergreen Resort.

We turned around and went back to photograph this sign. According to the manager on duty, the owner of Hickman's Exxon has gotten fed up with rapidly escalating gas prices and the all too frequent climb to change the numbers on this sign (about 20-25 feet up).











This was shot on Thursday March 6, 2008, when a gallon of regular was $3.34. Below, is the wide shot of Andy Hickman's gas station, which is just a short drive from the Blue Ridge Parkway, Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.