Snappy Snappy

Something you may not know about me is I was a fine art photography student for two years in college and for a while I considered making that my career. I abandoned it to go to cosmetology school after realizing it wasn't what I wanted to do for a living but I never stopped loving being behind the lens. I'll snap the occasional artistic photo but I mostly drag out my former skills to do family portraits of my brother's family a few times a year. But most recently I dusted off my camera to shoot cover images for Natural Harmony and The Low Notes!

I knew I wanted to shoot the Natural Harmony cover photo myself not only to save money but also to keep myself from seeing the same stock photo on someone else's cover at some point in the future AND to ensure my vision was exact. A mutual friend stood in as my Sabrina and, after being stood up by my original male model, my second shooter and good friend Jeremy stood in as my Wade. I got a great cover out of the shoot and a handful of extra shots that I've since used as teaser photos. I even added to the story by describing the dress Olivia wore on the day of the shoot to a certain scene. 

Here's a few of the shots that came from the day ...

 

 And of course the cover ...

Here's me, Olivia and Jeremy  on the day of the shoot giving our best 'model' faces. Jeremy makes me laugh too much so I could hardly keep it together. Olivia is clearly a blonde which made for some tricky Photoshop work for my cover artist, Jenny. She did a great job transforming Olivia into Sabrina. 

Next up is the second edition cover of The Low Notes. I adored my original cover but unfortunately I couldn't retain the rights to it after leaving my publisher to self-publish. So I knew I wanted something very similar and I thought, how cool would it be to shoot the piano I learned to play on as my cover? I hopped over to my parents' house and took a few shots and then with the help of Miss Jenny, the second edition was born. As partial as I was to the original cover, this one is better to me. Not only is it more meaningful knowing it's my own photograph (which has more meaning than any reader will EVER know ;) ) and the piano I grew up playing, it's also been amended to be called 'A Wexley Falls Novel'. I'm so excited to expand on the Wexley Falls world and adding that subtitle was the very first step.

Thanks to my amazing cover artist, Jenny Streif, my models Jeremy Shoemaker and Olivia DePaulis, and to all the readers who have complimented me on both covers. I'm proud that more than just my writing went into both of these books.