Do you have a child that likes to ham it up? We are seeking 4-to-6 year old Hispanic/Latino, Asian, South Asian, Native American and African American children to make faces for the camera!

Cat Thrasher Photography and the Child Study Center at UVa are creating a stimulus set of children making emotional facial expressions for use in scientific studies. It is important that this set represent the ethnic diversity that exists in the world, so we need your help!

Children are asked to come into the Child Study Center and pose emotional facial expressions. Appointments take place in Gilmer Hall, on grounds at UVA, and can be scheduled on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, anytime between 8am and 8pm. Visits take only 20 minutes, and children will receive a t-shirt or a small toy for participation. Parents will be paid $20 for their time.

Want to participate? Sign up by calling the Child Study Center at 434.243.5234 or emailing childstudycenter@virginia.edu and ask about the Face Pictures.

Know someone who might want to participate? Pass along the flyer below!

The flyer above is available in English or Spanish.

Early last week, I spilled hot chocolate on my laptop. It was filled to the brim with marshmallows that had turned soft and liquidy from sitting patiently in their hot little cup. It was perfect timing, really. I had been contemplating the effect technology was having on me. Just as, a little bit ago, I finished my first painting in an effort to slow down my portraiture, I had recently considered switching back to film in order to reduce my interaction with computers. All the information–it’s gotten to be too much. My easily wandering mind has been living such a digital life that I am spending 12 hours a day staring at a computer. Staring. Waiting. For the next blip. The next beepadebeep! Easy access to absolutely everything.

I might have overdone it with my hot chocolate solution.  I sent my computer to the hospital for a couple weeks.

In the meantime, I found this lovely crystal chandelier, second hand, and hung it high tonight in the studio. A bright, sparkly reminder of how many other spectacular things there are in this world.

Before barrels of snow fell on Virginia, we got one of those beautiful, fleeting winter days where it warms up to the lower 60’s, and everyone comes out of their houses to go for a walk and soak it up while it lasts. Luckily, this was also a day when I had clients scheduled! So, here’s a session from last month with pretty Quinn and her pretty parents on a pretty day in January! (Maybe we can will one of these days back into this sludgy winter mix…)

For the last of the snow pictures, this series came from a session with a little girl who woke up from her nap in the car to snow, a sled, and a frozen Potomac River.

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This series was taken amidst a windy downpour of snow in Alexandria, Virginia – the kind where there is a foot of snow on the ground with more to come, and no tire tracks on the wide streets because everyone is inside, waiting it out. It was the definition of a Snow Holiday: no cars on the street mean no work and no boundaries for play, no lines indicating where you should be and where you should not be – just a white layer of loveliness gracing the civilized landscape.