Joel and Ashley Selby of This Paper Ship not only love to illustrate and design, but they have a passion for photography and capturing a mood. Just like everything else, they team up on all photography sessions, contributing their different styles and angles to every single photo.
This blog will be a place for Joel and Ashley to update about their most recent photography jaunts both personally and commercially.
If you have any questions about portrait sessions, wedding photography, or anything else, please don't hesitate to e-mail us at thispapership@gmail.com or check out our website at www.thispapership.com for more info (coming soon)!
Yesterday we drove out to Columbia, South Carolina to take engagement photos of Danielle and Will. Ashley has known Danielle since high school but hadn’t seen her in 7 years! It was a wonderful reunion and an absolute blast photographing them. They are an adorable pair and we are very much looking forward to capturing their wedding next year!
We recently had the joy of driving all the way from Greensboro, NC to Bozeman, MT to shoot a wedding that Ashley’s cousins were a part of. It was a fun and exciting trek, and the long drive was well worth it. Brian and Julie were a pleasure to work with! They never failed to make us feel laid back and at home. By the end of our stay in Montana we were beginning to feel like family, and we weren’t too disappointed by the beautiful views we got to appreciate for a few days afterward.
Ashley has grown up pretending and playing around this bridge at her grandma’s house in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Through all the years of moving it has been one of the things she could count on (as well as her grandma’s house). It has since been torn down and rebuilt but the meaning is still the same. Sometimes you can find comfort in the most insignificant rickety things.
I want to show this one to our future kids and say, “This photo pretty much encapsulates who your mom is.”
—Joel
I’ve been taking a lot more self portraits recently because of the ongoing new photo blog with my good friend Chelsea, Face to Face, but find a lot of the shots end up being “disqualified” because my face isn’t in them. I got away with one faceless portrait toward the beginning but this one would just be cheating! So… I figured I would share it with you.
A lot of my days are spent around the apt. working, wandering, watering plants, staring in the fridge, drinking tea, and cuddling my daily company, my kitties.
I’ve never been that comfortable in front of a camera so taking a self portrait every Friday is a huge challenge. Not to mention you can’t get away with lazy, last minute photos! It really shows when you haven’t put the creativity into them. There are already quite a few that I wish I had done differently. But that’s the beauty of blogs! You critique, learn, create, grow, and keep going! Besides, the real point of the blog is highlighting our friendship. I so look forward to seeing our differing perspectives across the miles every week.
—Ash
It’s always fun developing random rolls of film and rediscovering the beauty of unknown results. Here are a couple of head shots we took this afternoon when finishing up a roll that had been sitting in one of our cameras for a long time. The row of sprouts below that were photographed back at the farm house last summer when we planted our first crop of turnips. We have no memory of taking that photo, along with many other random ones that came out of that roll, but we love the depth of field and bokeh the film camera brings to the table. If only it weren’t so darn expensive to develop!
You will probably see our cats show up a lot in photos… we just can’t help it! They are do darn fuzzy and photogenic! This photo was taken in the morning when the light was filtering in through our sheer blue curtains. Aki is Ashley’s baby (yes we know, she’s a cat).
To kick off our new photography blog, here’s a photo session we had in the park over the weekend! (For those who don’t know, it’s us in the photos.) Because sometimes the best dates involve simply creativity and each other.
For more shots from this session go here!
by Joel and Ashley
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