During the week of Christmas (since we were working on photos & photography 7 days a week throughout December/ start of January) we actually photographed 4 Family Portrait Sessions! Susie reached out to us in the middle of November a couple months prior to her family’s home Christmas Party saying that she had worked with Jenny’s mom at the hospital and wondered if we’d be available to capture their extended family during Christmas festivities! She said that the family hadn’t had formal Portraits taken in a good while and it seemed fitting that when they’d all be in one place already that they have these portraits taken!
Susie planned everything with us so that we could capture the Christmas Family Portrait Session at her brother & sister-in-law’s home! We came by and scouted out the home the week of their Session and loved the idea of capturing the portraits outside if the weather permitted. Since we didn’t get snow in December really, the weather was perfect and it was literally the warmest day of the week for their Session, so we were able to photograph it ALL outside away from the food and partying inside!
Since initially they’d thought that portraits would be inside, but didn’t want any Christmas-y things in the images (to keep them timeless/ classic) and were a large group, we were thrilled to get to photograph everyone outside! We had brought many of our studio furniture for their Family Portrait Session as well as our portrait studio lights on stands (and they provided another seat as well), so we did many of the portraits seated with some folks standing!
On that lovely day just 4 days before Christmas we captured first the entire extended family with grandparents in the middle (the ones who started it all) surrounded by their 4 adult children & grandkids!
Some photos even included one of the adult son’s 2 dogs since we were, after all, at their house!
This son and his wife whose home we were at had many acres of land which made it easy to capture them all within a gorgeous landscape of evergreens on this warm winter day just a few days before Christmas-!
Though we don’t personally know the family well, we felt like family afterward as they invited us in to give us some leftovers to go (since we had to immediately deliver a physical wedding album to a couple in Granger before they headed to a work Christmas party)! Everyone was so extremely welcoming and the food was delicious!
Thank you so much Susie & family for hiring us and helping us capture this gorgeous Christmas Family Portrait Session of and with you all at your family Christmas Party days before Christmas! We were thrilled to get to meet and capture you all so that you can cherish these lifelong memories-! Susie: Jenny’s mom says hi and had so many wonderful things to say about you! Thank you and your family so much for sharing some of your Christmas party leftovers with us too-! (That fed us for a few days as we captured Christmas Family Portrait Sessions during Christmas week and helped us keep going without having to stop and make food for a few days-!)
______ Unrelated: Coming up next week we’ll be sharing another Christmas Family Portrait Session from Christmas week: The annual Diroll grandkid cousin Christmas Family Portraits in our photo studio-! We’ve been capturing these annually since 5 Christmases ago when we’d just moved back to the Midwest about 3.5 months prior and had just gotten this blog and our newest website up and running-! Back then was a crazy time for us as we went to 5 or 6 huge wedding expos in 3 states in the following months and as we experimented with different printers and different high level professional photography wedding album manufacturers (since we wanted them to be far better than the makers we’d used since 4 years earlier at the start of 2012) and they were patient with us through the growing pains.
Coming up throughout January we have more recent Sessions as well such as a Surprise 30th Anniversary party that we captured less than a week ago as well-! We just printed 6 new final 2019 Wedding Package & Engagement Session orders over the weekend and shipped those out yesterday along with Engagement Session printed photos, so other than any printed of photos that we already did today, packaging tomorrow, and shipping on Friday, we’re done with printing, packaging, and shipping photos for 2 weeks-! Since we’ve been working 7 days a week on photography through the holidays, we’re taking our annual immediate family belated Christmas visits coming up in just a few days to Arizona & California while our amazing housesitter/ petsitter friends (who we pay) stay with our 3 pets in our own home to watch them! We’re so happy that we’ve been able to hire them for the past couple years to watch our pets since we have no friends or family members who ever offer to watch them from October through May! This New Year we are SO thankful for Sarah & Marie for their non-stop support in watching our fur babies at least once every year and are also thankful for our vendors who help us create gorgeous products for our clients-! Without folks helping us engrave our wooden wedding boxes, people binding our clients’ physical wedding albums, or the post office (and/ or UPS) workers helping us send these gorgeous products to our clients, we wouldn’t have a thriving business! THANK YOU to those folks who help us more than they’ll ever know and ESPECIALLY our clients-!! Without you, our business wouldn’t exist (or it could, but we’d have starved to death already)!