This is the third year I have done a family portrait of the Souther’s during the holidays. Someday we will do one in the summer or fall when there is more color in the surroundings…

You might remember this young lady from family portraits for her family recently, and snapped this candid at the end of the session. She will be a heartbreaker, that’s for sure.

Besides travelling to exotic locales such as Natchez, Mississippi, I have still been doing portrait work. With the way the leaves turned this year, we were still able to get some good family portraits of Violet and her parents at Corwina Park last week. I have known her for two years now (which, coincidentally, is how old she is) and it was fun to get out and take pictures with her. Watching her reminds me of watching my own daughter get older. I love how interactive Natalie is at age 5, but she was a lot of fun at 2, just as Violet is.

Anyhow, if you are looking to get some family photos done before the holidays, drop me a note and we’ll get a date on the calendar.

You can feel it in the morning air, fall is coming. That means it is the perfect time to start thinking about family portraits. It has been a few years since we last did ours, and we plan to do one when the leaves start changing. Contact me today to get on the schedule. We shoot at some great outdoor locations. Anywhere along Bear Creek is nice, and Red Rocks can be stunning.

I recently had the opportunity to go with Jon, Shelby and Owen to Corwina Park (between Morrison and Kittredge) for a family photo shoot. We had a good time, and they saw a park in the mountains that they had not been to before. Corwina is a really good setting for family or senior pictures, and is nice and close to Lakewood. Contact me today to schedule your photo shoot in the mountains.

A rare occurrence happened recently – all immediate members of the Souther Family were in town, so they took the opportunity to do a family portrait in time for the holidays. Any major holiday tends to be a good time to have your family portrait done, since that is the most likely time to have everyone close by with some free time.

Family portraits are a fairly new thing for me. So over the weekend I attended a seminar by Sandy Puc. Sandy is a very talented, very creative Denver photographer who has established a highly successful business doing portrait work. So successful in fact, that she now goes out on tour every year teaching other photographers how to be successful in the portrait space. If you have received one of her flyers in the mail and thought about going, REGISTER NOW! This seminar was great, and it covered things as basic as posing to the complexities of marketing your studio for maximum effectiveness. I feel 10 times more confident doing family portraits now, and I cannot recommend this class enough. Check out the info for yourself. If you are interested, register soon, her seminars sell out in nearly every city she goes to.

My daughter is one of the hardest kids to get a good picture of. At 3 years of age (4 in a couple weeks), she is a non-stop dynamo of energy that never seems to stop. That energy is magnified even more when we are exploring a new (to her) place.

This past weekend she decided she wanted to go see Red Rocks – as in the Red Rocks Park & Amphitheatre, but famous by the U2 video in the 80′s. It is actually a pretty popular hangout among people in Denver, there were a lot of people using it for a workout today (running up and down the stairs and “seats” is a popular workout).

Natalie was in explorer mode today, so she wanted to go all the way down to the bottom and look around. I was able to convince her to pose for me a little bit at the top first though. As she gets older, she is starting to enjoy being in front of the camera. Later in the day she told me I should be taking pictures of her splashing in the puddles left by the rain.

I haven’t shot any families with little kids other than my own, but my advice would be to be patient, follow the little ones around, and shoot a lot of pics to get the keepers. It’s kind of like shooting sports. They are that unpredictable and fast paced.

With their oldest home for the holidays with his little one, the Souther Family wanted to get some family portraits done for the holidays. The skies were crystal clear, but it was pretty cold out there. We got some great group shots, and some individuals too. I think we spent at most half an hour out there since it was about 12°F outside. They live here in Lakewood, so I was able to get them a CD within an hour so they could get prints made same day.

I love my little girl. Once in a while I am able to get a good candid of her. But by and large, whenever I take the camera out, she becomes silly and “unmanageable”. Saturday was one of those days. She went to a friend’s birthday party, had her hair and nails done (yes, she is 3), and came home looking cute as a button. Unfortunately, she was really wound up. So I ask you, how (if you can) do you get a child to sit down and do a few good shots? I’m sure if it wasn’t me, she probably would have been fine. I guess next time I’ll just wait it out until she settles down.