It’s been a few weeks since I shot this portrait with Siobhan so I can no longer remember where the idea came from to use balloons as a prop. There is a store around the corner from my apartment that sells about a million different things including balloons that you can get filled with helium, which was lucky. I really enjoyed buying the balloons for the shoot. Walking home with them looped tightly in my hand I felt like an excited little kid and I wanted to run and skip along the sidewalk while laughing out loud. I’m glad balloons can still feel so joyful even though I’m a grown up.

Siobhan was an excellent model and working with balloons made us both laugh a lot. I decided to scrap the original idea I had in mind for this shoot – Sio standing on the chair and floating with the balloons – because I didn’t want to go all crazy and photoshoppy. Also, despite the fact that the ceilings in our apartment are about 12 feet high, I STILL didn’t have enough room to compose things in camera that way I wanted.

I’m having a lot of fun inviting lovely female friends over to my home studio to pose for me. Everyone has taken to my invitation with enthusiasm so far, despite any misgivings about feeling unphotogenic. For this shoot I put together a flickr gallery of balloon images take by other photographers. You can check it out here. I really like using the new gallery feature for inspiration.