Family Portrait

This post is a long overdue one.  Sorry for the delay.

My family hasn't had a professional family portrait in over 10 years, long before Bro met V, much longer before Brady came into the world.  So I had the idea to have new portraits done for my parents' house.  The timing became more urgent because Bro and family were about to move to Arizona, and I was worried about the treatments that my mom had to endure. 

I searched the internet and found a photographer local to Bro, and really liked the naturalness of the pictures in her portfolio.  I also liked the package deal that was offered.  It turned out that the only available time for the whole family and photographer Sharon would be after Mom's first round of treatment, but she was still willing to take them.  My mom is quite the trooper.  She even had another appointment after our photo session, and Sharon was flexible with our last-minute change in time due to the medical appointment.

I wanted our pictures to be outdoors, and there was little park a couple of blocks away from Bro's house, so I told Sharon about it, and she checked it out a couple of weeks before our photo session.  I only had one request about my family's attire: there was to be no combination of blue and orange or I would be unhappy.  (It's a Bro vs. Ate thing).  I really don't know if they were planning on that combo in the first place, knowing my feelings about it, but I didn't want to get everyone (meaning me) in a tiff right before we were going to have to smile for the camera.

We met Sharon in the park, and she had us pose in different places, different combinations of people, whatever we wanted.  Brady needed some warming up, but he was fine eventually.  We were amused by Sharon's successful attempts to make Brady laugh by pretending to sneeze.  We did have to bribe him with pennies to keep him smiling, though.  By the time we got to the playground pictures, he was having such a ball that he forgot all about the fact that there was a photgrapher there.  

Since Sharon's daytime job is as a lawyer, she had a standard contract, which included an agreement as to whether or not she had the permission to use our pictures in her online portfolio.  Part of the package was that she would furnish a CD with all of the pictures taken, and sign over the copyright to us.  That's a nice bonus that other photographers, at least prior to the digital era, never did, and I appreciated the fact that she encouraged us to have other prints outside the package ones done at Costco or other websites.  

I was quite pleased with the photo session.  Sharon was very friendly, and the contract was professional.  The photos developed beautifully, and they were done on Kodak Professional Endura paper, which made them really shine.  Sharon had a last-minute 7-day escrow to deal with at the time of her developing, so she threw in some extra 5x7's for me to apologize for the delay, which was a really nice customer service touch.

I highly recommend her to anyone that needs photos done, whether they be family portraits or weddings. I mean, LOOK at how pretty we all turned out!