Your Portrait Session with Me

If you’re getting ready for a portrait session with me, I want you to know right away that it’s not going to feel stiff, rushed, or overly structured. My goal is always for it to feel easy, relaxed, and honestly more like taking a walk with your people than anything else.

When you arrive, we’ll start by just meeting and talking for a minute. I always like to check in on what you’re hoping for now that you’re actually here in the space. From there, we’ll look around together and decide what feels right. Do you want to head toward the water, the trees, the buildings, or more open areas? Every location has a different feel, and we can move through them and see what naturally fits your session.

Once we get started, we’ll simply walk through the space together. We’ll pause along the way at spots that feel visually interesting or meaningful, and we’ll create images as we go. Nothing overly complicated. Just moving, interacting, and letting the session unfold naturally.

One thing I want to be really clear about is that I’m not going to pose you into stiff, exact positions. I’m not going to adjust your hand an inch to the left or ask you to hold your head at a perfect angle. That’s just not how I work. Instead, I use prompts.

That might look like asking you to snuggle in close, walk together, look in different directions, sit down for a moment, or just interact with each other in a natural way. I might ask you to say something silly, whisper something funny to each other, or give me your best “blue steel” face just for fun. The goal is to get real reactions instead of forced poses.

In my experience, and what I see time and time again, the best images always come from those in-between moments. The laughs, the movement, the little glances, and the natural connection between people always photograph better than anything overly staged.

If your session includes a larger group, we’ll also break things down into smaller combinations along the way. Couples, kids together, parents with kids, smaller family groupings, and anything else that makes sense for your family. This gives you more variety and more images that feel personal and meaningful.

By the end of the session, my hope is that it doesn’t feel like you just “had photos taken.” Instead, it should feel like you spent an hour walking around, hanging out, and enjoying time with your people, with me tagging along and occasionally giving you something fun to do.

And when you look back at your photos later, I don’t want you to just see poses. I want you to remember the moments. You might see your kids laughing and remember that I told them to whisper a silly secret. You might see yourself looking at your partner and remember that I simply asked you to think about your favorite person.

That’s really what I’m always trying to do. Freeze the real moments. Show you and your family exactly as you are, but in the absolute best version of yourselves.