About a month and a half ago mom Samantha reached out to us about a Christmas Family Portrait Session. Samantha is one of Jenny's 13 cousins (26 if you count their husbands/ wives) and is one of the two cousins closest in age to Jenny (just a year older). Since most other cousins (especially on Jenny's dad's side) were significantly older or lived hours away when younger, Jenny, her sister Jill, Samantha, and Samantha's sister Jessica all got to partake in fun things together like trick-or-treating and other various holidays seated at the "kids" table together while growing up. When older Jenny even got to visit Samantha both in high school (on a school visit) and few hours away in college twice for the infamous "Little 5" at Indiana University-! (haha Pretty impressive when you consider that Jenny didn't even have a car in college. Shout out to friends who carpool and drive their car-less friends around!)
Last year we held Holiday Mini Sessions here in South Bend and Samantha had reached out to us then about them. She lived down in Fishers near Indianapolis and unfortunately we couldn't rally together enough families in Indianapolis to head down there for a day of Indianapolis Mini Sessions (since it'd be a 5 hour round-trip for the short Mini Session of 20 minutes we'd been hoping to rally together at least 4 to 5 families for Minis all in a row), so we were bummed that we couldn't take their Christmas Family Portraits last year for the 2016 season. She and her family (husband and two sons) recently moved for work from their beautiful house near Indianapolis to a new house further northwest in the state for work, so they have ended up now an hour closer- about an hour & a half from South Bend. When Samantha reached out to us this year about a Christmas Family Portrait Session in late fall, we really wanted to help out and make it work. Since she and her family were coming up for Thanksgiving, we tried to figure out a day that week that we could photograph them for their Family Portrait Session. Sorting through things for a couple weeks we figured out that we could probably do Thanksgiving day itself since we were all heading to our aunt's afterward for the holiday dinner. That week we (Jason and Jenny) scoped out the area near our aunt's house for any leftover beautiful autumn trees with leaves for a couple hours to no avail- the leaves due to very weird weather had stayed green most of fall, then suddently all turned brown and fell off the trees after a few days of rain. We finally found some prettier landscape and a few fall leaves closer to downtown South Bend and things were set!
We started the Session with full family portraits in a few locations. We wanted some candids mixed with some more posed photos so that there'd be a good variety and though a couple of them were a bit under the weather, you couldn't tell by their beautiful fall photos! The Morans did a fantastic job smiling through their Session and beared with us through the cooler weather.
At one point in between 5 different spots for the full family portraits we pulled the sons aside and told them that they could play with some leaves and ignore us. The youngest Kash loved running around throwing up fall leaves and had a blast. Carter helped Kash out by throwing up leaves for Kash to run through. It was pretty adorable and we loved capturing the pure joy!
Though we've been doing full Family Portrait Sessions and Senior Portrait Sessions this fall rather than "Minis," we did make it a shorter one for them due to cold weather and convenience, so the Session flew by! We pulled out a blanket, captured some more of the family sitting in the fall sun, captured some awesome individuals of Carter, and less than a half hour later we were all piling back into our two vehicles and heading over to our aunt's for Thanksgiving!
Thanks so much for reaching out to us again, Samantha! We had a blast photographing you all on Thanksgiving and are so excited for you to get your holiday cards and matted linen print that came with the Session! We had a blast printing them and love the two designs you chose for the holiday cards, so we're excited for you to get them this week in the mail. We can't wait to see you all again soon at Christmas in a few weeks and genuinely enjoyed our nice, fun Family Portrait Session with you all a couple weeks ago! Give our love to the kittie(s)!
Unrelated, this week we took photos of the 6th grade volleyball team that Jenny volunteers to coach, we've been printing and sending out clients' custom holiday cards and linen photographic prints (hundreds!), and are hopefully wrapping up editing the last wedding of the season while printing even more holiday cards (designed by our artist) for clients so that they can send them out to their loved ones! We've loved the wedding consultations with some amazing couples that we've had over the past couple weeks in our consultation office, are SO excited for their weddings, and are happy to be booking up 2018 and slowly but surely 2019. We're going to be sending out wedding photo products, senior portrait physical photo products, and Christmas + New Years cards along with various other physical photo products well into the first couple days of January as volleyball coaching ends for the season. Right after that and the new year we head off to 2.5 weeks of family and friend visits across the country and out of the country, so we're trying to get every single 2017 thing finished this December! We also have two work holiday parties this week at the infamous South Bend Tippecanoe Place and LaSalle Grill with fellow young professionals and then fellow wedding vendors (that we're very thankful to have been invited to), so our schedules have been packed tightly. Since we're our only two employees of our L.L.C. business, it's been wonderful to be invited to various work-related Christmas parties within this first week of Christmas! We hope you're all having a wonderful first week of December and that you're all getting ready to spend more quality time with family and loved ones! Two more weeks until winter officially starts and 3 weeks until Christmas-!!