04/27/2026
True story: I cried on the way to this session 😆 I can’t even think of the last time I did that. I am the queen of over-preparedness, nothing usually catches me off guard with work, but it seemed like everything that could go wrong this day went VERY wrong.
As we prepped my gear, none of my strobes fired 🙃 All the batteries were dead. I was 5 hours from home and no one in these small remote towns had them in stock. THEN I realized that my normal backdrop + stand set up was completely unusable. AND THEN, in a freak accident, I busted my eye (MY SHOOTING EYE😱) and it was completely red and swollen and blurry.
For one brief moment, standing in the battery aisle of Napa Auto Parts (my last ditch effort to get my strobes going), I thought about calling Cierra to reschedule. I knew she was also having a rough morning and things weren’t exactly going as planned for her, either 😆 But then I thought, screw it, if we’re going to trash this session I might as well just show up and see what we can make happen. She was already there, with a beautiful and willing model, and I wasn’t about to let the opportunity go to waste.
It turned out to be one of my favorite branding sessions ever. We took what we had to work with and got creative and trusted the process and it paid off! I’m so glad we didn’t throw in the towel or we wouldn’t have walked away with these bangers.
Shot on Canon R5 with one A10
