09/09/2026
There are some people who just make a photo session easy.
Angela Ford is one of those people.
This was a really nice session with Angela and her son Carter, and also we had somebody extra special with us. Angela’s mother, Martha, who now lives in Alberta, was home and joined us for a few portraits as well.
Three generations.
And when you see them together, you don't have to look very hard to see where the genes came from. Martha is a gorgeous lady, Angela looks like her, and Carter certainly carries some of it along too.
The apples don't fall very far from the tree in this family. 😊
Now, the first thing you notice when you meet Carter is his energy.
He is one of those young fellows who is instantly smiling, and before long, so are you.
He also has one of those charming smiles that I think might get him pretty far in life.
So naturally, I had to ask him:
"Have you ever gotten out of a speeding ticket with that smile?"
His answer?
"Not yet." 😂
Which might be a good thing, considering his dad is a police officer.
And that brought us into something I really enjoyed hearing about.
Carter genuinely admires his dad. In fact, he told me his father is one of his role models.
But there's more than just a father-son relationship there. You can tell they're friends.
We got talking about that Instagram account where the young fellow is constantly finding good-natured ways to annoy his father, and Carter laughed because apparently he and his dad have a little bit of that relationship too.
So I asked him how he decided that he wanted to become a police officer himself.
His answer was pretty simple.
He watched his dad.
He knew college wasn't really for him. He didn't want to do a trade. He said he did OK in school, but also admitted he probably didn't work as hard at it as he could have.
And that's OK.
School isn't everybody's thing. We're certainly not all meant to follow the same road.
But what impressed me about Carter is that he seems to know himself pretty well.
You see that in his hockey story too.
Carter has always been a smaller guy. He's around 140 pounds now and really only had his growth spurt this year.
So growing up playing hockey, he was often competing against bigger kids.
He had to figure out another way.
He told me he learned to play smarter.
I loved that.
He wanted to play hockey because he loved the game, and if he couldn't compete with size, he was going to figure out how to compete another way.
And he did.
He made the high school team, which wasn't easy. They won Cape Breton and finished fourth in the province.
His grandmother Martha said something about him that stuck with me.
She said she always admired his heart.
I think maybe another word for it is tenacity.
He just kept going.
His mother says he's also the social guy on the team. Apparently she and his father can be sitting in the parking lot for quite a while because Carter will inevitably be the last one out.
But one of my favourite parts of our conversation was hearing him talk about his mother.
He laughed and told me he admires the fact that his mother knows how to put him in his place when he's being — and I'll use Carter's terminology here — "a sh****ad." 😂
He admitted she's right most of the time.
Actually, he said something I don't hear from young people every day:
"She knows better than me. Both my parents do."
Hmmmm.
I don't get THAT answer very often. 😂
But it told me quite a bit about him.
There's a self-awareness there, but there's also a very obvious respect for his parents.
And then came the scavenger hunt.
Apparently this was VERY important because Carter made sure I knew — I believe three times — that THEY WON. 😂
You wouldn't know it from the finished photographs because we did a little repair work, but Carter's eyebrows looked like somebody had taken a lawnmower to them.
There was a reason.
During the scavenger hunt, he had three choices.
He could have his eyebrows hacked up.
OR...
Call one of his parents and tell them he'd gotten someone pregnant, before eventually admitting it wasn't true.
OR...
Call his parents and tell them he'd been pulled over for stunting and was going to lose his licence.
Carter apparently didn't need much time to weigh the options.
Goodbye, eyebrows. 😂😂😂
He had absolutely NO interest in listening to his police-officer father lose his mind over the stunting story...
And apparently telling his mother she was about to become a grandmother wasn't terribly appealing either.
So the eyebrows took one for the team.
And remember...
THEY WON. 😂
The more I thought about that story, though, the more it seemed to fit everything else I learned about Carter that day.
He's funny. He's social. He likes to have a good time.
But underneath all of that, there seems to be a young man with a pretty good sense of who he is, a lot of heart, and a genuine respect and love for his family.
And I think that's a pretty darn good foundation for wherever life takes him next.
Angela, Martha and Carter — thanks for another really enjoyable day.
And Carter...
The eyebrows grew back.
The pictures are safe.
And yes...
I promise everybody now knows you won the scavenger hunt. 😂
