#colorado portrait photographer

[swkrullimaging]

Eagle Eye

[tetramodal]

Three baby fox squirrels left their squirrel box for the first time today.

[josharlington]

[cgoldenvisuals]

My friend Shannon has been telling me to make a Tumblr for my photography for awhile now, and I figured it was time I listen—hence the introductory post

My name is Cortnie, and I’m a photographer from Wichita, KS but currently based out of Firestone, Colorado.

I specialize in portraits, but I always love any opportunity to be behind the camera. My website with my portfolio will be linked below for those interested!

While photography is my focus, I dabble in film, painting, and writing as well. While my other social medias are almost exclusive to photography, I plan on sharing more of my other works here as well.

When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with friends, family, and our dog Stark or exploring Colorado, our new home. I am a movie/television fanatic, book nerd, and a gamer currently obsessed with Hogwarts: Legacy.

Instagram: @cgoldenvisuals

Facebook: C. Golden Visuals

Website/Portfolio Link Below

[jojuliaphotography]

Let’s be honest, when a toddler is part of your session, they determine when and where the photos are taken. Make sure to wear comfy shoes cause you’ll totally get your steps in during your shoot! Always a good time with the Oetting family. Loving how the whole session coordinates with Miller’s amazing eyes 🤩 . . . . . . #jojuliaphotography #goldencolorado #goldencophotographer #family #familyphotographer #familyphotography #lifestyle #familyphotos #lifestylephotographer #lifestylephotography #denverfamilyphotographer #coloradophotographer #denverphotographer #portrait #colorado #photographer #lookslikefilm #adventurealways #familygoals #coloradonative (at Golden History Museum & Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ceo_ngkpyLl/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[natejordon]

JORDON FAMILY FALL PORTRAITS

Fall colors are popping Pueblo. Perfect timing for our annual family self-portraits.

Fall colors are popping Pueblo. Perfect timing for our annual family self-portraits. We popped in at Mineral Palace Park and grabbed a few shots at sunset – here’s the highlights.

[itsjustmitchie]

lovesick

[raincliffs]

Westward

[abalidoth]

🌻

Oh shit I totally missed this one, I'm sorry! I was doing Weird Tessa Stories for these, right? Alright, a long one to make up for the delay -- the worst photo experience of my life.

So the year is 2017, I'm finishing up my Ph.D. in Laramie, WY. I'm massively stressed and dissociating all the time from both the stresses of academia and four years in the closet. This was distinctly in my "nail polish and skirt goes on Friday afternoon and comes off Sunday evening" era. I'm also looking for jobs to get OUT of Laramie.

My parents see my LinkedIn picture, which at that point was a selfie, and as a birthday present they offer to buy me a professional photography session to get a nice looking picture for my website/linkedin/etc. Okay, this seems fine. They find a photographer, I go meet with her.

I immediately get Weird Vibes from her. Her office is in this loft thing downtown with tons of example pictures, it looks like she specializes in senior photos and wedding photoshoots but in a way that feels very pandering to that crowd? Also she's talking about her second vacation home in Colorado so I'm like, lady you're already wealthy why the fuck are you doing this

She's incredibly solicitous, all praise and flattery and fluff. Her emails are downright florid, and she's the same way in person. She's the walking incarnation of a Hobby Lobby wooden Bible verse sign.

But the most salient part of the consultation for this story is that she insists on COMING TO YOUR HOUSE to critique your wardrobe.

She comes over and paws through my selection of Guy Clothes (which despite making up most of my wardrobe, I don't care that much about at this point) while constantly making comments to Emma about "Oh, haha, he's such a guy, you know how men are!"

(Emma, for her part, is doing a valiant job of defending me against this dysphoria without actually outing me, because she's the best.)

So, a suit that fits her specifications is selected and the day of photographs comes around. At this point, if I was paying for this myself, I would have bailed long ago; but it was a gift from my parents and I'm debilitatingly conflict averse, so out I went.

Immediately she takes me to a back alley in Laramie. I ask her why, she says she wants to get some casual shots of me first. I tell her I'm just here for business shots, she tells me to loosen up, it'll be fun!

Did I mention I'm conflict averse?

So I'm standing there in an alley, holding my suit jacket over my shoulder in the most awkward possible way, staring at a piece of graffiti that says "JESUS SUCKED YOUR DAD'S COCK", when I start to realize that maybe this has all gone a little off the rails.

Eventually we do get some good professional shots by the river.

A couple weeks later she calls me in for a consultation. I bring Emma along for moral support, because the weird vibes at this point are getting pretty overwhelming. The photographer sets up a projector and shows off these hugely blown-up portraits of me on the wall, saying "Oh, getting a print of this size is only $930, I have one above my couch!"

(Also, she's showing off the alley pictures. I do not want the alley pictures. I think maybe Modern Tessa could pull it off in like a crop top or something, but Awkward 2017 Closet Tessa in a suit could not. We tell her we do not want the alley pictures. She shows us more alley pictures.)

Each time, she's trying to talk us down and down to smaller and smaller sizes of print. My dysphoric ass at the time doesn't want ANY picture of myself hanging on the wall; also, that's just not the tenor of our decor at all. We keep politely saying no.

Also keep in mind that MY PARENTS HAVE ALREADY PAID HER FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHS.

Eventually we're just blunt with her: my parents already paid, can you just give us the digital files? We hired you for a LinkedIn photo, you have taken the photos, we don't want prints.

She says "I don't give out digital files."

Not once during this whole process has she mentioned this; not once in all the times that either my parents or myself have told her that this is for job hunting. We say this, and additionally say "When we hired our wedding photographer, she gave us a thumbdrive with ALL the pictures she took, AND the retouches, as part of the package."

This woman has the fucking gall to say "Well, I'm sure some people do that, but not serious portrait photographers."

We manage to get out of there without buying a fucking poster-size print of Jesus Cock Alley Tessa. I call my parents and tell them the situation. My parents, eminently practical people, say they'll deal with it.

Two days later I get an email from her, forwarded from my dad. It has the subject "linked in photo attached", no text, and a single medium-resolution picture from the river photoshoot, and I never hear from her again.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The Supreme Court is being warned about the potentially dire consequences of a case next week involving a Christian graphic artist who objects to designing wedding websites for same-sex couples.

Rule for the designer and the Justices will expose not only same-sex couples but also Black people, immigrants, Jews, Muslims and others to discrimination, liberal groups say.

Rule against her and the justices will force artists — from painters and photographers to writers and musicians — to do work that is against their faith, conservative groups argue.

Both sides have described for the court what lawyers sometimes call “a parade of horribles” that could result if the ruling doesn’t go their way.

The case marks the second time in five years that the Supreme Court has confronted the issue of a business owner who says their religion prevents them from creating works for a gay wedding. This time, most experts expect that the court now dominated 6-3 by conservatives and particularly sympathetic to religious plaintiffs will side with Lorie Smith, the Denver-area designer in the case.

But the American Civil Liberties Union, in a brief filed with the court, was among those that called Smith’s argument “carte blanche to discriminate whenever a business’s product or service could be characterized as ‘expressive,’” a category of businesses that could range from “luggage to linens to landscaping.” Those businesses, they said, could announce, “We Do Not Serve Blacks, Gays, or Muslims.”

Smith’s attorneys at the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom say that’s not true. “I think it’s disingenuous and false to say that a win for Lorie in this case would take us back to those times where people ... were denied access to essential goods and services based on who they were,” said ADF attorney Kellie Fiedorek, adding, “A win for Lorie here would never permit such conduct, like some of the hypotheticals that they’re raising.”

Smith’s case follows that of Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who objected to creating a wedding cake for a gay couple. The couple sued, but the case ended with a limited decision. Phillips’ lawyer, Kristen Waggoner, is back before the high court Monday arguing for Smith.

Smith wants to begin offering wedding websites, but she says her Christian faith prevents her from creating websites celebrating same-sex marriages. That could get her in trouble with state law. Colorado, like most other states, has a public accommodation law that says if Smith offers wedding websites to the public, she must provide them to all customers. Businesses that violate the law can be fined, among other things.

Smith, for her part, says Colorado’s law violates the Constitution’s First Amendment by forcing her to express a message with which she disagrees.

Among Smith’s other opponents are the Biden administration and 20 mostly Democratic-leaning states including California, New York and Pennsylvania. The states told the court in one of 75 legal briefs filed by outside groups in the case that accepting Smith’s arguments would allow for widespread discrimination.

“A bakery whose owner opposed mixed-race relationships could refuse to bake wedding cakes for interracial couples,” the states said. A “real estate agency whose owner opposed racial integration could refuse to represent Black couples seeking to purchase a home in a predominantly white neighborhood; or a portrait studio whose proprietor opposes interracial adoption could refuse to take pictures of white parents with their Black adopted children.”

Those race-based examples could get particular attention on a court with two Black Justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who are married to white spouses and another Justice, Amy Coney Barrett, who has two adopted children who are Black. But the states gave an example involving a person’s national origin too. “A tattoo studio could ink American flag tattoos on customers born in the United States while refusing to sell identical tattoos to immigrants,” they said.

Brianne Gorod of the Constitutional Accountability Center, representing a group of law professors, hypothesized other examples of what could happen if Smith succeeds at the high court.

“A web designer could refuse to create a web page celebrating a female CEO’s retirement — violating Colorado’s prohibition on sex discrimination — if he believed all women have a duty to stay home and raise children. Similarly, a furniture-maker — who considers his furniture pieces to be artistically expressive — could refuse to serve an interracial couple if he believed that interracial couples should not share a home together. Or an architect could refuse to design a home for an interfaith couple,” she told the court.

Smith’s supporters, however, among them 20 mostly Republican-leaning states, say ruling against her has negative consequences, too. A lawyer for the CatholicVote.org education fund told the court that if the lower court ruling stands and Smith loses, “a Jewish choreographer will have to stage a dramatic Easter performance, a Catholic singer will be required to perform at a marriage of two divorcees, and a Muslim who operates an advertising agency will be unable to refuse to create a campaign for a liquor company.”

The Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty put it differently, telling the court that a Jewish baker could have to fulfill the request of a Neo-Nazi who wants a cake saying “Happy November 9th!” — a reference to Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Nazis burned synagogues and vandalized Jewish businesses throughout Germany and Austria.

Alan B. Morrison, a constitutional law expert at Georgetown University, underscored that Smith doesn’t currently do wedding websites, making the case particularly speculative and, he says, problematic. Still, Morrison chuckled at some of the hypothetical scenarios both sides came up with, suggesting they are “a bit overblown.”

The examples, he said, are “the kind of thing a law professor would think of.”

[swkrullimaging]

Essential Equipment

What are three objects you couldn’t live without? Sunday blog prompt from WordPress is a good one. What do we really need? Excluding food and air, of course. Well, for sure, I  could not run my business without a camera, communication, and transportation.  Although a good  phone could actually fulfill two of those requirements these days. And I need my truck. It’s been broken down for a few…

[katekelton]

https://gallery30south.com/kelton-phoenix/

Kate Kelton: PHOENIX

JANUARY 2023

Seeking to elevate brave Silence Breakers who’ve come forward during the #MeToo movement, Kate Kelton’s portraiture combines their oft familiar faces with elements of her family’s Czech architecture. Her portraits are cloaked in the garb of statues that Ladislav Šaloun sculpted onto the central train station that her great- grandfather, Josef Fanta, designed for Prague between 1901 – 1909. Sampling and mixing her own lineage, Kate has transformed a historical body of work, itself a thing of lasting beauty, exchanging granite for graphite; plaster for paint.

Headdresses and crowns deify Kate Kelton’s subjects. She uplifts the Unsung Sheroes & Heroes, Patriarchy Smashers, Warrior Survivors, Silence Breakers, Philosophers, Truth-Tellers, Whistle Blowers and Thought Giants. She paints portraits cloaked in the garb of statues Ladislav Šaloun sculpted onto the train station that her great-grandfather, Josef Fanta, designed for Prague in 1901 – 1909.

Apotheosis through a reclaimed, reapplied Art Nouveau.

Kate’s recent work is a matter of expansion through contrast – she is as ephemeral as her subjects are concrete architecture; she is structural when her subjects should slip through your fingers like too-fine sand. Taken as a whole, the works in her magnificent series Phoenix are incredibly intelligent, but when looked at individually, you come to understand that these are statements of life beyond themselves. The series take embellishments of a Prague train station designed by her great-grandfather, Josef Fanta, and combines these with portraits of men and women who have stood against the sexual harassment and assault rampant in Hollywood –particularly those who have testified against Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and Bill Cosby, and made allegations against Franco Zeffirelli, Donald Trump, Russell Simmons, Max Landis, Michael Jackson, Nick Carter, Luc Besson, and others. These women, like Kate herself, have suffered in the era where powerful men, every bit as immovable as the train station, wielded their power without check. The portraits emblazoned on architectural elements, they are marked against the edifice, every bit as permanent, and perhaps even more defining. If you approach those as portraits, you’re taking the moment but missing the permanence. If you take them as statuary, you’re missing the fact that they are, in fact, alive within those gazes. It’s really incredible how much a shift of the light, a dart of the eye, can turn each of them from a memorial into a promise. This is not an exhibition about tragedy. This is a monument to courage, survival and empowerment.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kate Kelton was born in the south of Germany, after her parents escaped Czechoslovakia. Her early years were spent in a VW bus traveling Europe with her mother, an abstract painter. Settling in Toronto, Canada at age seven, Kelton attended the Etobicoke School of the Arts as a Visual Arts Major, and received a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Film, from Ryerson University. Her father was an architect. His grandfather, and namesake, was Josef Fanta: renowned Art Nouveau architect, engineer and sculptor, who worked closely with Alphonse Mucha. Photographer Dagmar Hochová is Kelton’s great aunt, on her mother’s side. Kelton also had a recurring role on Stephen King’s Haven on the Syfy Channel. When the illustrated re- edition of the book it’s based on, The Colorado Kid, was published, she illustrated the front and back inside covers. Her first lead role on tv was opposite Eric Roberts and Eddie Izzard, in the Independent Film Channel’s Bullet In The Face. Alex Maleev illustrated her for the poster. Her first feature film, Deepa Mehta’s The Republic of Love, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her film credits include cult classics, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and American Psycho II. Did you also spot her in music videos, like Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me?” Almost as good as googling her as “the Tic Tac girl.” ;} Kate has exhibited her artwork internationally for decades, at, among others: the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the New Walk Museum & Art Gallery in the UK; Gallery 1988 in New York, Venice, and West Hollywood; Gabba Gallery, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, and Durden & Ray in Los Angeles; Art On Scene in Beverly Hills; Galerie F in Chicago; Lawless Concept in Montreal; and The Sony Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto. Her work has toured with Yoko Ono’s Group Show Arising from Zurich, to Portugal, to the UK and Germany.

[petsincollections]

Portrait of a man with a dog

Studio portrait of a man who sits in a chair and holds a small dog (a pug) in front of a painted backdrop. The man wears a dark colored jacket, a vest, striped trousers, a shirt and a light colored necktie. A watch fob is attached to his vest.

Photographs - History Colorado

Denver Public Library Digital Collections

[jojuliaphotography]

The last time I saw Natalie and Eric they were celebrating their anniversary in Vail and we did a fun couple’s session. In the last 6 years they’ve been BUSY and made two perfect little girls Kate and Quinn. I have loved seeing the little updates here and there over the years and so it was especially exciting when they had another trip to Colorado and made time to hang out with me!! I love your family. Your grace and love for your girls is inspiring - so good to see you again! . . #jojuliaphotography #mtfalcon #morrisonfamilyphotographer #morrisonphotographer #family #familyphotographer #familyphotography #lifestyle #familyphotos #lifestylephotographer #lifestylephotography #denverfamilyphotographer #coloradophotographer #denverphotographer #portrait #nothingisordinary #alifealive #livefolk #colorado #photographer #denver#makeportraits #lookslikefilm #liveessential #adventurealways #familygoals #coloradonative (at Mt. Falcon - Parmalee Trail) https://www.instagram.com/p/CfFhPKmJz7k/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[byconnornich]

My name is Connor Nich – I'm a portrait photographer based in Denver, Colorado, originally from Albany, New York. Centered around a meaningful connection, my work communicates my understanding of the world around me, providing light into the lens of an artist with epilepsy. 

Inspired by @jaserhunter this morning.

[itsjustmitchie]

new years resolution: commit to your hugs