Of all the family sessions I shot last fall, I’m perhaps most proud of this one. It was my last one and the forecast was looking bad. Like, really bad. It was really cold and getting colder and rain started to move in. I happened to have a slot open up at the very last minute so I asked the Johnsons if they could come early, even while knowing myself how difficult it is to move your photos up at the last minute like that. Maybe they weren’t ready? Maybe their son was taking a nap? Or needed a snack? Or 20 other things. All in all, I very well know when getting ready for our own family photos how everything, including getting ready, is timed out to make sure we all get out the door on time. So moving things up at the last minute isn’t the easiest thing. But they completely rolled with it and were like, “Sure! We’ll come right now!”

So first of all, you can probably guess from that background that they were really easy going and fun to work with, but here’s the other part to the story: it did start to rain. Misting rain and so so so cold. Because of the rain, I couldn’t shoot in the open field where I had been doing other family sessions that weekend. So I told them to warm up in their car while I figured something out. And there, right behind us, was an overhang of a tree that was big enough to block some of the rain and, strangely, provided a much brighter fall look. (It was truly the dreariest, gray, cold rainy day.) So we used this little patch of grass between the road and the parking lot and it was perfect. And that’s how it happened that the most weather-challenging session became the one I’m most proud of.