Musings on a family portrait...

As a parent and a photographer, I feel that it's really important to take a family photo at least once a year.  I want my son, Brendon, to have a visual record of what his parents looked like when he was young.  Seeing as he's not quite two, he won't recall much of these early years and I need to have evidence to prove to him that we weren't always as old as dirt!

For us, scheduling a session is a nightmare.  Our schedules are unpredictable at best.  In order to get a session done, I contracted with a photographer in Denver, Stefanie Burt, to photograph my family while we were visiting friends.

I've been asked many times how a photographer picks a photographer.  I did all of my research via the internet.  The first thing I looked at were the blogs.  If the photographer didn't have a blog, I eliminated them right off the bat.  Blogging provides all of you out there a glimpse into our personalities and the photos we love.  Stephanie's work is fabulous and her blog is great.  We loved working with her.

Our clothing choices stressed me out for weeks.  Our goal was to look like "us" (without the juicebox stains and with good hair.)  Brendon is really into cars and trucks right now and I wanted to work that into our session.  I found an outfit for him at the Gap months ago and knew that it was "the one."  The sweater and pants both had cars on them.  Derek and I choose outfits to compliment Brendon's clothes.  I think my sister was ready to kill me by the end of last week because I had been blabbing on and on about our outfits for weeks.  She and I had one too many conversations regarding the "color wheel" and how it related to our outfits. At one point late last week she threatened to punch me if we had to talk about it again...she's glad it's over.  Love ya, Erin!

Regarding our session...I have had many clients tell me that they will be impressed if I got one good shot.  I felt the same way after our shoot.  Brendon was not the most cooperative little boy that morning.  He is 22 months old and does the "typical toddler" back arch when we tried to sit him down...somehow, I forgot that he was in charge.

So, now we wait for our images...hitting the refresh button 1,000 times per day...I feel the same excitement that all of you do after a session...time cannot pass quickly enough.

Stefanie posted a few awesome previews on her blog this morning (see below.)  You can view the rest of the blog previews HERE.