This family has been coming back for portraits with me since they were pregnant with their daughter and this was their fourth session with me. I love seeing how much their little ones have grown, even in just 6 months’ time.
This session, although one of my most challenging, turned out to be one of my favorites of the year. Toddlers can be very unpredictable, and this family has two of them. Both kids started the session in bad moods. I had never seen either of them act up at any of our past sessions, so we must have caught them both at a rough time of day. It’s not often, but sometimes this happens, where you get lemons and you have to work hard to make lemonade.
Once we got one calmed down then the other one would start up. This went on for quite awhile. 😉 I think the combination of the time of day (dinnertime = hungry) and the weather being so hot that it just made for some cranky kids. I couldn’t blame them. I had to photoshop flies out of some of these photos as they were flying all around our faces! Although it’s mostly pleasant here in San Diego, we sometimes get some yucky sticky weather.
So, what do you do when this happens? You keep your cool and have a sense of humor, and never lose your patience or give up. These are some of my favorite clients, and I wasn’t about to go home without giving it 110% of my effort to capture some awesome and authentic family portraits of them. I knew it was hard to take time out of their busy lives to have portraits done.
I’m thankful these parents kept their cool and were willing to try everything possible to get some smiles out of their little ones. Family photos, especially at these young ages, are a team effort. And, yes, after staying for MUCH longer than we anticipated being there (I pushed my camera’s ISO to the highest I had ever used it since we stayed until the moon was shining), we got some amazing photos that I’m proud of and that I knew they would love. I have to give a shout out to the teeniest little purple flower that we found, which brought so much wonder and awe to the kids’ faces. Because of this little flower, we were able to create a story and capture so many adorable photos of them sharing this flower and smelling it together, although it’s so tiny that you can barely see it in the photos. Ha! I hope you enjoyed hearing the backstory to this session. I hope you enjoy the photos too.
