When Mark Cornellison was 10 or 11 years old, his dad gave him an old Pentax ME Super camera. Cornellison took it with him pretty much everywhere he went.

“(I) took a lot of pictures with my dad – film, slides, prints, all the above,” he said.

And it turned out he had a knack for it, a photographer’s eye.

He spent years studying and developing technical skills to hone that knack, that eye – and he’s now built a successful photography business, Lama Glama Photography.

Cornellison focuses on portraiture, specifically headshots, children’s portraits, dog portraits and event portraits. His photos are crisp and striking; they’re also something more. He’s able to pull soulfulness out of his subjects, human and canine alike.

Little bridges

His work leaves you marveling, guessing and admiring.

Cornellison loves meeting and connecting with people, and his camera is "a little bridge, I guess you could say,” he told the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business.

The job has proved to be a perfect fit, he said. “If I didn’t like getting to know people, I probably wouldn’t be very good. ... You kind of need to want to be around people.”

Cornellison, who lives in the Tri-Cities area with his family, originally is from Everett.

In high school, he worked as a photographer on the yearbook and newspaper.

“I spent hours and hours in the darkroom,” he said, even sometimes working on his own until midnight or later as he was pressed on deadline.

But he loved it – the process of taking a photo and capturing moments in time. He studied more in college and “got a little more advanced in the darkroom,” he said, even learning techniques developed by famed photographer Ansel Adams.

Mark Cornellison, owner of Lama Glama Photography, specializes in portraits, specifically headshots, children’s portraits,dog portraits and event portraits.

| Photos courtesy Mark Cornellison/Lama Glama Photography

Passion for portraits

In those early years, he discovered that he gravitated toward portraits.

To him, there’s something about a face, about the eyes – the depth, the feeling. “Even the quietest, simplest portraits, where there’s very little expression on the person’s face ... as the observer we will dig into their eyes, so to speak, really focusing in on their eyes,” he said.

He noted that babies will lock onto a smiley face drawn on paper. It shows that people are wired for relationships and connection, he said, and so much of that is expressed through the face and eyes – and captured through portraiture.

Cornellison, who also has a photo retouching business, brings his photography equipment to his subjects instead of having them come to a studio.

It makes for a more comfortable and convenient shoot, he said.

While he’s been taking photographs of people for years, Cornellison got into dog portraiture a bit more recently, after a friend of his wife’s requested that he take a portrait of her aging dog. More dog portraits have followed.

Like their human counterparts, the pups in Cornellison’s photos are intense, beautiful, curious, intelligent, mischievous – it all varies from dog to dog.

Meaningful work

For Cornellison, the portrait work, whether it be human or dog, is meaningful.

It matters; it lasts and adds weight and gravity.

In this digital age, people take thousands upon thousands of photos on their phones – photos that often become buried in cloud storage. But portraits cut through that.

“Instead of just a picture that may remind you of, say, a birthday party or a trip to the Grand Canyon,” portraits evoke “memories, plural, of a season, especially in your children’s (lives), when they’re growing up so fast,” Cornellison said.

They do something else, too – something Cornellison has experienced personally.

He has portraits of his wife and kids at home, “and most of the time when I see them, especially if I’m by myself and it’s a quiet moment for whatever reason, I’m really thankful," he said. "I look at them and I’m so glad that I get to be a husband and a father to these people. It’s quite a privilege, and those prints remind me of that, way more than just flipping through some photos on my phone.”

Go to:  lamaglamaphoto.com.