My Family's New Favourite Person | Chilliwack Family Photographer

November has been a crazy-busy month for me... in fact, it has probably been my busiest month since I started my business! Of course, this is fantastic.. and I can't thank my wonderful clients enough... but it has brought a few challenges balancing work and home life. Well, without the lovely lady in these family photos, we may have starved!

OK... maybe "starved" is a little exaggeration, but I can say that she has seriously saved my sanity, this month. Angela is the brains & talent behind "Thyme to Enjoy", and she offers various chef services including private function catering, cooking lessons, kids' cooking parties and fill-your-freezer days. It was the freezer-filling service that came to my rescue - and it not only saved me a stack of effort and stress on busy working days, but her meals were also insanely delicious! (So much so, that my oldest daughter said she wanted to kidnap her and make her cook all of our meals forever... her words, not mine!)

Anyway, enough food talk (before the drooling clogs my keyboard) and onto her family photos! We braved a very chilly November morning to capture some lasting memories with an outdoor family portrait session... followed by a very quick dive into the studio for a couple of business headshots (featuring her very cool, signature, pink chef coat!) and a wee school photo re-shoot. It was a rather productive morning!

A Beautiful Evening By the River | Chilliwack Family Photographer

I really enjoyed catching up with this lovely family again, last week. (I last saw them just under 2 years ago, when their little lady visited the studio for her Newborn Session.) After a few days of gloomy, wet BC weather, we were a little worried about our photo session being washed out, but Mother Nature came through for us - the sun came out just in time.

Once again,  they were a real pleasure to photograph. With 2 children under the age of 4 and a nervous doggie in the frame, this family session could have been a real challenge, but Mom & Dad were totally on board with keeping the experience relaxed and fun for all. They were wonderfully patient, and completely went "with the flow" - even if that meant stopping multiple times mid-session to collect leaves, find cool rocks or take a quick snack break. The result was a relaxed shoot with great memories and great images to keep.

You Can't Forget Dad! | Chilliwack Family Mini Session Photographer

With all the chaos of "back-to-school" finally settling, I can now catch-up on my blogging again... and to start, here is a little mini session that I captured a few weeks ago.

As, "Milestones Memories Members" (with maternity, newborn and 6 month photo sessions under their belt), I have had the great pleasure of getting to know this lovely family and fully capturing their journey into parenthood. Unfortunately, Dad's busy schedule meant that he missed out on the final session, so when they came to hang their beautiful images on the wall, Daddy felt a little "under-represented". Well, we certainly couldn't let that happen! We soon fixed this decor in-balance with a Daddy-Daughter Mini Session... and like every session before, they knocked it out of the park!

Don't Put Off What You Can Do Today | Chilliwack Family Photographer

How often do you say to yourself  "I should get some up-to-date family photos done" but then life gets busy, you forget and another year rolls on without it happening? How often do your family albums look like a member of the family (the photographer!) is missing at most events?

Well, if you still need some inspiration for a great New Year Resolution or a goal for 2014, then I have a little suggestion for you... get those photos done, and get in some photos yourself! If you really need to, you can pretty much juggle ANY schedule, but you CANNOT turn back the clock, and you have NO idea what is coming round the corner tomorrow.

Take our wedding, for example... we have 1 group shot that I adore... it is not anything special or particularly unique. It is not an award-winning photo and not everyone is smiling or posed perfectly. It is just a simple shot of everyone who came to our wedding... but within 18 months of that photo, 3 of those people had passed away (and 2 were very unexpected). Sadly, that is the harsh reality of life.

OK... so, I have a confession - I was the worst offender for not being in photos or putting off our own family photos. Yup... pot meet kettle! (Phew... that was a relief to get it out there!) At the end of last year, I decided that I should listen to my own advice and get our own family portraits done. I hooked up with my fabulous photographer buddy Pam (Pam Dykstra Photography) , who had the exact same problem and thought, and we did a session swap! It was our turn first...

Photograph courtesy of Pam Dykstra Photography

I LOVED our shots and am SO glad we did them. I now exist in photos and we have 3 canvases proudly adorning our walls. It was also a great learning lesson, for me as a photographer, about the stresses of outfit picking for the family!! (Watch this space, as I now plan to add a pinterest board to help!)

A few days later, it was Pam's turn!

So, you can make many excuses why you can or may not get photos done, but I am pretty confident that you can also find a solution for each one. In the words of a wise man of the South, "get er done"!

Welcome to the world, beautiful little girl... | Surrey Newborn Baby Photographer

When this family walked through the studio door, my heart didn't just melt at the sight of their beautiful new daughter... it disintegrated when I also met her very handsome big brother! Wow, these guys make cute kids!!

Family Shooting Season is OPEN! | Chilliwack Family Photographer

Although, there is no better time to have a family portrait than the present (never put off to tomorrow what you can do today!), it does seem to be a more popular activity in the Fall. Probably because everyone wants a nice photograph to send with their Christmas cards, but they want to get them done before the bad weather takes hold. It is this time of the year that the requests for sessions start to roll in a little faster than normal, and the calendar fills up a lot quicker!

I have decided to make last weekend's Gustavson Family my official starters of this year's Family Shooting Season... because they were just so awesome to shoot and so much fun to work with! I love these guys...

Apples, and babies, and weddings... oh my! | Chilliwack Photographer

Wow, it's been a busy month... and it doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. (No complaints here tho!)

My new Summer resolution, to blog more, seems to be as successful as all of my New Years Resolutions... i.e. not very... so I thought I would chain myself to my desk until I had at least 1 post done. A few weeks, a few commercial shoots, 2 weddings, 2 online courses, a couple of baby shoots, and a lot of Summer activities later and here I am back again to try to get at least 1 post finished!

Of course, all the photo sessions and Summer fun means that some home duties get abandoned. Last weekend was the first chance we got to stay home and catch up with all the jobs we have just talked about for weeks! First up - apple harvest! Our poor heaving apple tree could take it no longer... after 2 years of poor or no apples, it was making up the difference with a mega-crop! So, we dropped everything and launched into a mass harvest and freezing session...

My husband wasn't overly impressed that the workflow slowed down every now and then so that I could record the memory and "pose" the apples (hey, I'm a photographer... what does he expect?!)... but he soon became distracted by the discovery that he could use the apple corer/peeler to make curly fries! (Boys with toys!)

Are the Easiest Kids to Photograph Your Own? | Chilliwack Childrens Photographer

That is a question I have often pondered...after all, I do have daily access to 2 exceptionally cute models, so you'd think that I would have thousands of fantastic shots of them.

Yes, I do know how their brains work. Yes, I know the buttons (or bribes) to get some kind of result. Yes, they are comfortable around me. Yes, they are VERY comfortable around a camera. But NO, they are not the easiest kids I have photographed!! Yes... I said it. The truth is out. You see, I am still their Mum... and so I get the sighs, a lot of "do I HAVE to?"'s and various forms of fake smiles and weird over-posing. Eventually, I get the shot... but it usually involves a Twizzler or the promise of a sticker on the reward chart!

I finally managed to get them in a good place, and in a good mood, at the weekend... not enough of a good mood to get nicely-combed hair though. Oh well, that's how I will always remember them anyway!

Happy Father's Day! | Chilliwack Family Photographer

To awesome Dads everywhere... and a couple in particular...

Happy Long Weekend Friday!

I know that, for many Photographers, the weekends are not really considered a real weekend because that is when we are usually at our busiest... especially for Wedding Photographers... (long weekends are definitely no exception!)... so why do I still always get excite to see Friday??

Grooming the Next Generation...

As any parent knows, kids like to mimic their parents and, since I seem to have a camera almost surgically attached to my face half the time, it only seems natural that they should want to take photos too. So, a few years ago, we bought our oldest daughter one of these indestructible toddler cameras - yes it was indestructible, but the photo quality sucked... and I don't mean compared to a DSLR... I mean it makes the first ever wooden box cameras look like a Mamiya! However, she was 3/4(ish?) at the time, and really didn't care, so I bit my tongue, smiled that "Mummy is happy that you are happy" smile and moved on.

Life thro' the eyes of a 3-year-old...

Well, as expected, our youngest has now been bitten by the shutterbug, and was running round the house trying to find 1 of the 2 kids cameras that we own. No luck. Sad face. Big puppy dog eyes.

So, I relented and handed her my semi-ancient Kodak P&S. She watched excitedly as I loaded it with cheap double A's, a 2MB SD card (yeh... I know... even half full, the photo register was at over 1500 shots left!). Off she went on a journey of photographic exploration...

It was great to watch her... watch which subjects she chose... and the delight on her face, when she reviewed each shot!

One thing did disturb me, tho...

When she discovered that she was taking photos of her fingers, by accidentally putting them over the lens, she then decided that these images were actually really cool. She then set off to deliberately photograph them!

Should I be inspired or worried? Gifted artist or potential "Dexter"?