creativity|design|life

These past couple of weeks have been really great with family coming in to celebrate the holidays.  My brother, his wife and my nephews came in from Las Vegas, my oldest brother came in from the valley with his wife, my other brother came in from Hollywood, my cousin came in from L.A. with his family and another cousin came in from the westside.  I  know what you’re probably thinking, the valley, the westside, L.A., and Hollywood?!  That’s just a few miles away!  Vegas is the furthest!

The funny thing is though, even though we’re pretty close to those people geographically, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we seem them physically all the time.  It’s like if you live in Orange County, and you live by Disneyland, it’s not like you go there everyday.  It’s more like, it’s there and I can go to it whenever I want, but the reality is, I probably don’t really go that often.  Everyone has begun new chapters in their lives, which makes getting together harder.  But when we do get together, it’s that much better.

This holiday season, my brother and his family from Vegas were in town for a whole week, which meant for me… PHOTOSHOOT!  I was going to work on a christmas card for them this year that had a “woodsie” theme to it.  Branches, leaves, cranberries, reds, browns, golds, are kinds of images I begin to see.  I really wanted to go all out, so I began scouting for locations a few weeks before they came down and thinking about wardrobe changes.  Ultimately we ended up going to Downtown Disney to shoot with no wardrobe changes.  He warned me that shooting kids would be tough, but it was something that I thought I could handle.  At the end of it, shooting kids for a family portrait was tough!  If I had an assistant to help distract the kids it would have been awesome.  I wasn’t too excited about the shots I got, but before my brother and his family left for Vegas a few days later, we took some shots in the driveway.  They came out so much better and have have so much more life to them.

Sometimes the best shots come from when planning isn’t involved, it’s just when things happen.