04/29/2026
These are old photos of my daughter, Class of 2024.
Just some insight……
I had a young girl reach out to me that has started photography and told me that she went to a photo shoot and it was a complete bomb and that she froze up and couldn’t even remember because she was so nervous how to fix the settings on her camera. So this is for those of you that are just starting out. I am not by any means a professional, I do it as a hobby but I have done it quite a while now lol
Things go wrong with something on all my shoots even if it’s small. I hate the sun I can’t stand a photograph in it and of course it’s gonna be out in every photo shoot I have lol. My clients were always gonna forget something and that’s OK. Sometimes we start to photograph and forget that they have a hair tie on there wrist 🤦♀️🤪 A lot of times Mom And daughters fight during the shoot that’s OK too. Mom does a lot for the shoot and get stressed out and girls always feel They are never perfect, you don’t have to be. In my early days I accidentally set my camera on a timed mode where it only photographed one photo every 10 minutes and me and the young boy that I was photographing had to Google it on our phones to figure out how to get it off of that.  that was embarrassing lol. My old camera actually died during a photo shoot, thank goodness it was with a boy and not a girl. 🤪
This is a particular shoot I will always remember and love. These are old pics of Ava. A week before the shoot, we fixed her hair and make up and she loved it and we drove to a location called Swan Lake. I was gonna photograph her with swans in the water or so I thought, Well on the way there we had one of the worst thunderstorms I can ever remember, like it was a monsoon. So we had driven an hour there just to drive an hour back soaking wet with no photos. 
So next week we put the same dress on she did her hair and make up and she was not happy with it. We ended up going to a location that was not my first choice, but in the end I ended up, loving the photos to me they were beautiful. They were not perfect, loose hair is everywhere, the sun was bright, no swans, but she decided to get all the way in the water, wet hair and all and those ended up being the ones that were my favorite and that I printed.
The reason I’m posted this is things are going to go wrong for you as a photographer and a client during a photo shoot, things are not going to go perfect. There’s just a number of things that will happen but in the end as a photographer it’s just important that you take the photos. As a hobbyist I still learn with every shoot, never stop practicing. I still have a freak out moment before every shoot. And you do not have to have the most expensive camera or the most expensive lens, but I will tell you the lens is more important than the camera. I shoot with a good one, but she is not the most expensive thing out there. I think you need to master the skill and really learn what the camera you have what it can do. You have to learn to be creative and try different stuff so is gonna fail, but someone’s gonna surprise you. You need to learn your editing style, and you need to practice, practice, practice. Go on YouTube, go on Google ask other photographers, I was lucky enough to have some really great ones. Answer a lot of questions for me in my early days. And some even now. 
As a client, Let go have fun. Let your alter ego come out. You need to capture these moments because life goes by so fast and you need something to remember how beautiful and special you all were at this age, take the photos, get a little wild, a little wet, laugh, it’s OK if the photo is imperfectly perfect ❤️
She will always be the most beautiful thing I ever captured. ❤
