Tonight I had a few ladies over for some delicious food, a little wine and some talk about photography and inspiration. Oh and there was some gossip, too (what do you expect? we're only human!). Anyway, it was just nice to sit down and look through beautiful photography books and talk about what we find inspiring and why we're drawn to certain artists and their methods (and whether we've tried those same methods or not). It was also great because I learned about some photographers I don't follow, and that's exactly what I was hoping for.And in case you guys were wondering, one of my all time favorite photographers is Richard Avedon. While he took a ton of wonderful, beautiful portraits of famous people, I am always inspired by his portraits from the Southwest in the early 1980s. You can see a sampling of those images here. The light and the honesty in those images just takes my breath away.