Portraits of those who attended the Brand Opening at Bloodline Merchants on Thursday, October 21st. It was a great time, getting to meet so many people, and having the opportunity to share wall space with many other great creators/artists. I can’t say enough about the staff at Bloodline Merchants, and the gallery itself is amazing. Please take some time to stop through sometime when you are in Oakley.
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BLOODLINE MERCHANTS BRAND OPENING 10/21/21
Mandafested 2020
Starting in late July of this year my wife Amanda & I started doing some test shots for fun. This has turned into a weekly excercise for us, and has become the highlight of my year! Each week we challenged ourselves to come up with a new look.
For Amanda, it was about expressing herself through creating different wardrobe and makeup ideas, as well as practicing different posing/modeling techniques. For myself, it was about pushing my skills to come up with different and unique lighting for each setup, and to work on improving my retouching/post processing abilities. Although we already spend the majority of our time together, taking the extra time to do these photo shoots has brought us even closer, and made a pandemic year a little less gloomy.
These are our 10 favorite shots we did this year! We hope to continue shooting on a weekly basis, and get to produce a number of new, fun portraits to share next year.
Smith and Hannon
Joyce Smith is the owner/operator of Smith & Hannon bookstore on Vine Street in OTR. Smith, a great grandmother, has been in Cincinnati for 26 years. Also a retired school teacher, Joyce had worked at the Freedom Center on the banks for 3 years before following her dream of opening a bookstore in downtown Cincinnati.
Smith & Hannon has been in OTR for 1 1/2 years. The bookstore is proudly black owned and features books & products catered to the community that lives in the surrounding neighborhood, as well as many others. Having the ability to provide access to books, especially for the youth in the community, was Joyce Smith’s main goal with the bookstore.
She loves meeting new people and making new connections in the community. Her hope is that her daughter might one day run the store, but for now she enjoys the day to day activity of the business.
If you have a chance to be in OTR make a point to stop in to Smith & Hannon and say hi to Joyce! Support black owned & small businesses!
Joyce Smith, owner & operator at Smith & Hannon bookstore in OTR.
Pressure
Pressure: a photo essay by Andrew Doench. Met with Kelly Mitchell for a portrait session and to talk about his life living with Glaucoma, and his history with Pancreatic Cancer.
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