IT BEGAN AT THE BEACH

After a year of shaping my vision for a new photography business I’m finally close to marketing the photography site. Bella Famiglia Photography started with my friend Buddy, owner of the SouthPort Raw Bar, asking me to photograph his pregnant wife Noi. When asked I immediately remembered the photograph I shot of my godson’s mother on Fort Lauderdale beach. Veronica and I were driving along A1A near Las Olas, I had a white Roman column in the back seat of my car and she was 8 months pregnant. I suggested we take the column on the beach and have her sit on the column for a photograph, with a Hasselblad film camera. I think it took less than five minutes to shoot the picture.

Fast forward 11 years, me with more photography experience and seeing the same image with Noi except executed with location lights and the latest digital equipment. A full fashion shoot, the one that makes the bathers wonder who is that famous model. We arrived at the beach, battled 20kt winds with flying sand, I used Buddy as a light stand to hold the soft box and watching him point the light everywhere but at his wife. The shoot was a total struggle. But the reward came at Noi’s shower, she unwrapped the picture and began to cry, months of carrying the child she expressed her love for Buddy and how he has been a wonderful husband while she held the framed print. It only equaled the time that Todd, my godson’s father and Veronica’s husband, walked into my house and saw the photograph of his wife with child on the column on the beach. “The most beautiful picture I have ever seen," Todd said.

I couldn’t think of any better reason for Bella Famiglia Photograhy to be, I had taken photographs that truly offered my closest friends a special memory to have for life. And those memories will always be with me, and it makes Bella Famiglia Photography a passion more than a business.