Have a photo shoot, right?!  I don’t remember the exact temperature of this October day, but I was so amazed at how long we kept these little ones smiling!  Aren’t they adorable?

This one absolutely melts my mama heart—how precious!

As always, my favorite shots are the ones where the kiddos are just doing their thing.  What a sweet family! 

Thank you so much for the opportunity to photograph your beautiful family. 

It was such a privilege to share in the celebration of this couple last Friday.  They are so sweet together and I wish them a lifetime of love and happiness!  Congratulations, Abby & Adam! 

I can’t wait to share more images from their special day!

I had a recent photo session with a group of little ones and one “big boy.”  There were four kids aged two and under!  It was fun and definitely amusing, particularly when we tried to get them all together for a group picture. 

It involved a great deal of work by two of the mommies:

Who knew it was possible to have 5 children looking every direction except the direction of the photographer?  This one makes me laugh.

We did it!  By that, I mean that the mothers are all putting on an amazingly crazy show behind me to get their attention.  I wish I had eyes in the back of my head!

And then we got this one—my favorite!

More to come of all the kids.

Here are some of the pictures from the second day of homeschool portraits.  Day 2 was pretty chilly in the morning, but the families were good sports and I had just as much fun as I had on the first day!

In the hustle and bustle of welcoming a new little one into our family, I realized that I failed to post pictures from a late summer “photo shoot” I had with my six-year-old and my hubby.  Since we homeschool, we go for non-traditional school pictures and that is what I was getting—the first grade pictures!  And since my hubby is a self-employed web guy, he needed some new pictures to plaster on his website.  So here is a sampling of each of them.

In the attempt to get just the right shot (especially when photographing children), I often end up with what I call the “real life” shots.  The sillies, the tears, the pouts.  And I can’t help it—I always love them.  Because as a mother, I know all too well how quickly these years go and how easily we forget some of those moments or those faces.  When photographing my oldest, my six-year-old, this summer, I “forced” her out into an overgrown area where she encountered grasshoppers.  And this is how she felt about it:

As cute and adorable as she is in the following pictures, they just don’t tell the story that the first two do.  And while we all love cute and adorable (they are so much fun to frame and hang), photography to me is about a story and about remembering.  In twenty years from now, I’ll remember the sweet little smiles (they’ll be hanging on my walls, after all), but I also want to be able to look at that picture of her fretting about bugs and remember the little whimper she did.  As hard as it is for me to believe now, I think I’ll want to remember that pout (and will find it so much more adorable!).  I say it all the time—a photo session shouldn’t be just about getting perfect pictures (although we hope for a few of those!), it should also be about making and capturing memories. 

More “memories” from this photo shoot should be coming soon!

We had a photo session on this young man’s birthday…pretty cool that he didn’t mind spending part of an important day getting snapshot after snapshot for his senior pictures.  I felt blessed to meet such a nice young gentleman and I enjoyed some of the unique shots we took, including some with a prized possession of his—his grandfather’s truck!  I played around a bit in post-production and added a few artistic finishes on some of them, so hopefully he doesn’t mind my interpretations! 

He even had the shirt to go with the theme—it was perfect!

A few more sneak peeks from the session:

I am enamored by this handsome little man, his big, big eyes, and his sweet parents—they are such a cute family!

I am in love with this beautiful and photogenic family!  I’m a little biased because they’re good friends, but really, they take such wonderful pictures!  I had a great time photographing them this morning—here are just a “few” of my favorites!

See how natural they are?  Seriously—I just told them to goof around so I could get my lighting and settings figured out….these are a couple of my favorite pictures!

Dad and the little guy! 

I mean really—isn’t he DELICIOUS?!  I love his expressions!

These last few were just a fun way to end our shoot—on the warm beach on a sunny Saturday in August. 

The sessions for October 1st have filled up, so I have added additional sessions on Friday, September 30th.  15 minute sessions are available starting at 9:45 until noon.  Email or call soon to reserve a slot! 

The Sept. 30th sessions will be held in Grand Rapids at the Old Central School.