Family, Creativity, and My Photography Business

Summer has come to a close. Kids have gone back to school. New goals, new routines, and schedules are being set. Some people grieve the start of the school year as it means the end of summer vacations and slow mornings. Some people long for it as they tire from the bickering of siblings and are ready to get their kids on a schedule.

This past summer for me was spent doing significantly less photography and really settling in to spending time with my family. My boys are growing so quickly it seems. Though I doubt they’re actually growing at a faster rate than anyone else’s kids it kind of feels like it. My oldest turned 13 this summer, just started junior high and is going to be taller than me in no time. My younger boy turned 11 and just began 5th grade. They are at a such a fun age. I am thoroughly enjoying them. But I am also seeing how fast junior high and high school will likely seem to go. So this past summer my husband and I chose to be intentional with our time with them. I also needed a bit of a break from some aspects of my photography business. I was tired, feeling in a bit of a rut, and running dry on creativity. I needed to pull away, think, pray and just take a bit of a break.

What I found is that I love creating. It’s, in fact, part of who I am, part of my makeup. And by late summer I missed it. I started to really focus in on what type of images get me excited, fuel me and make me long to create more. And what I found…. is even though at times people want posed, facing the camera images, those do not create a fire in me. The types of images that I really love to make are ones that show emotion and love between people, tell a story, or capture a moment in time. As my boys are getting bigger the images that I most love are not the ones where they are sitting perfectly with their arms around each other. Rather, the images I treasure are the ones that remind me of who they were in that moment in time, whether they were sucking their thumb, laughing hysterically, or exploring with sticks. In this image above they were playing a silly game on the beach with their dad. Drew came up with this game, he named the game “Boop!”. They laughed so hard at this ridiculous game and all it involved was running around on the beach trying to bonk each other on the back of the head. It’s these silly, random things that I want to remember as I document my boys’ childhood and our family life together. 

So as I’ve spent time thinking this summer I’ve been making some new goals for my photography business. I want to create images for families and mamas out there that they will treasure and love as their family grows. But I also want to create images that I am passionate about. I want to capture real moments, not fabricated moments. I want to create images that will help our fading memories go back to the silly, the sweet, the lovely, even the hard moments and recall our journeys.

Of course, I will still capture the sweet newborn phase which I adore and we can still plan out our clothing, aiming to look our best and set our photo sessions up for the best scenario possible. And then… let’s let the personalities be present and enjoy the relationships and have a blast! And all the while, I’ll be there capturing, creating, and guiding when needed so that you can have images of the relationships and people that you love.