All photos captured using a Hasselblad and Kodak Portra 400 film.

Happy Birthday, Lulu!!

These girls are two of my favorite Fab 5 clients! Their mother finds the most amazing dresses for them. Thank you for being such wonderful subjects, ladies!

Get ready for a cute-attack! I’m amazed at the happiness exuded by this infant and her older brother. I had such a hard time narrowing their pictures down to the 10 best because they were so adorable!

(This is the third in a series of my favorites from last weekend’s Fab 5!)

One of my favorite sessions from last Saturday’s Fab 5!

All this week, we will be sharing our favorite photos from this past Saturday’s Fab 5 Day! It was my first official day back after the birth of Veronica Rose, and I had a bunch of fun connecting with all of the awesome families that came to have their children’s picture taken…including the two adorable little boys below.

We have one more Fab 5 this Spring, and then we are on break until the Fall!

Check out the video preview of the book, or go buy it on Amazon if you are inspired to have your dog as part of your wedding! You can also follow Wedding Dogs on Facebook. Bow wow wow!

This is my sister, Ali, and her husband, Dan. Their children have heavily inspired the genesis of my family photography work, as they had the first grandchild of our family back in 2004. Two additional children later, their family is officially large and full of love!

This is one reason I had them drive from Harrisonburg, VA to sit for a formal portrait: the more children we have, the less we formally document our own growth. And in Ali and Dan’s case, after almost 10 years of marriage, I don’t think I’ve seen one formal portrait of them alone.

So often, and with all good intentions, parents let pictures of their children document their own lives. But, while our children are always the most important thing, we still need to take a moment to ourselves. And that’s what this portrait is for.

I love looking at this shot and thinking of all that Ali and Dan have accomplished together. They are the center of their ever-growing family, and after almost 10 years, they fill the roll with love and grace. That’s what I think of, when I look at this picture.

There’s nothing perfect about the photograph above. In fact, there was not one perfect picture among the three rolls of film that I shot on this family outing last month. But this one emerged as my favorite shot. Here’s why I did not disregard it in my grand cull of the day’s pictures, and why it’s so important to me:

First, Jim looks incredibly handsome here, and his face is the first place that my eye goes when I look at the shot. I know that he’s smiling for the camera, but you can also tell that he’s having a genuinely fun time, because of the authenticity of his smile and ease of his gaze. He loves to be out and about with Lulu, and he’s always in the current moment during outings like this one. His face says that to me, here: that he’s all-present, not thinking about work or money or life stress. All he’s thinking about is Lulu on his shoulders, the running river behind him, the sun-filled landscape, and the wind in his hair.

Then, my eye goes straight to Lulu’s turned head. While some might delete  the picture during a grand edit due to this head-turn, that’s actually the moment that my love for the picture is solidified: it’s a true Lulu moment. Lulu loves to be stimulated (and distracted) by her environment. She likes to discover new things and meet new people and fall in love with things around her. We had just arrived at the park in the shot, and she was enthralled with the sight of it: children playing frisbee, birds chirping, the Rivanna flowing fast behind her – there was so much to look at and encounter!

And then, as if to accentuate the active mind and short attention span of an energetic toddler, the wind picked up her hair and smothered her face with it, replacing our view of her face with a view of her little ear, in a moment of chaos right before I clicked the shutter. That burst of wind adds much drama to her pose and emphasizes the turn of her attention and fascination with all things around her.

Overall, the picture turned into a “posed candid,” because even though I posed them, something happened, out of my control, that made the picture even better. With the ease at which digital photography allows us to capture more and more perfectly framed pictures, the imperfect ones begin to shine through to me the most. At the very least, a shot needs to have a unique element to be remembered in our minds. Or, as Alexander Liberman stated in the forward to Passage:

“Photography needs to be dramatized more than any other medium. The world is inundated with images that seem to blur gray in our minds. For a picture to strike memory, it has to have an unusual unique, inherent secret – a visual signature.”

This shot has that inherent secret, that visual signature: the dramatic turn of Lulu’s attention. It’s important to keep these pictures in our archives, because no photographer can plan these tiny moments of authenticity, making the few we do get priceless pieces of family art!