This Weekly Wednesday we’d love to share with you a Holiday Family Portrait Session from one of the recent Sessions at our studio! Though it’s been a very unusually warm 50 degree winter up here at the top of the country (only a few hours from Canada) with NO SNOW in the past over a month, we have been capturing client Sessions inside of our studio. The outdoors are very brown and bare and we’ve had requests for Sessions after sunset (which is currently around 5:30 p.m. here), so these Sessions work best in our studio. (Normally people request Studio Sessions during the snowy winter months because they don’t want their children or themselves to stand in wet, cold snow).
This Weekly Wednesday we’re sharing with you the Diroll grandchildren Christmas Portrait and some other photos from the hour Session. The matriarch of the family (“meme” Mary Ellen Diroll) has hired us during 3 Decembers in the recent years to capture the Holiday Family Portrait around mid-December usually the week before Christmas. She then chooses her photo products at the end of December or beginning of January after we finish editing her photos over the week and we get to going on printing her order to deliver to her. We just finished printing her recent order of a canvas and various other textured photo prints over the weekend (along with the mounted prints that already come with her Session), so we figured now would be a great time to share some of the photos from the Session!
Though she’d hired us before to take photos of other things over the years (starting 6 years ago for a wedding rehearsal dinner), our first formal Family Portrait Session of her grandchildren was a few years ago in 2015 right as we were getting settled into Michigan, adopting our cat Kevin, and had just rebranded our photography business with a new website (though we’ve had our photography business websites online now for going on 11 years). Back then we came to her home and set up studio lights as we styled the space for the Portrait Session and have previously even come to their business to capture the Grandchild Family Portrait with a backdrop they printed and our Christmas tree & decorations/ seating that we rolled in on our rolling platform cart. Now having been settled into our studio, consultation office, & editing office in South Bend, Indiana for almost 3 years we figured we’d see how getting the 9 grandchildren into our studio with our props would go! Doing it this way gave us time the evening before to set everything up, test the lighting scenarios, tweak the set-up, and have everything ready to go as soon as the last children arrived. (This was much better than scrambling for 45 minutes getting every light, prop, and equipment out of the trailer/ car and set up in whatever space it is while everyone waits on us… photograph for up to an hour… and then re-load the car/ trailer for another half hour to then re-load back into our studio when we got back- essentially an unnecessary additional 3 hours of work of tearing down, setting up, tearing down, and setting up an entire photo studio.) This was definitely the most people we’ve had in our studio with a whopping 20 family members (since all but one parent came), but we think it went very well! Check out some of the best photos below!
With the kids getting older every year it gets increasingly easier to photograph them as a large group, though while editing we do still have to move a couple faces around via Photoshop. For the most part though this year didn’t require too much coaching from their parents and all of the kids did well staying calm and smiling!
The kids even got to do a cute photo with santa hats, light up rudolph noses, and more in their matching outfits which was cute!
This year as you can see we added some colored lights (red and a lighter green) to keep the photo festive for the holiday season. As as you can see even the parent had matching outfits to the kids!
We hope that you had a great recent holiday season and transition into the new year! We hope that the kids/ high school/ college/ masters students have enjoyed their break from school and that they are heading back into the new semester/ quarter ready to tackle academia! Thanks again to the Dirolls for being such great spots for the Christmas Family Portrait Session and we hope that you’ve had a great start to the new year!
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Next Weekly Wednesday we will be sharing a Newborn Session that we photographed this week in our studio and cannot wait for you to see these adorable photos of Dean at only 12 days old! Definitely check back next Wednesday to see this adorable Newborn Session with the little nugget Dean! This week we’ve been working on physical Engagement Session albums, an Anniversary Session album, and a couple of last 2018 wedding printed products! We’ve mailed out and delivered more print packages to clients as of Monday and cannot wait to get more out on Friday in a couple days-! After work this week during the evenings we’ve also been putting into practice the Marie Kondo method of deep cleaning and have cleaned up studio and then Consultation Office and have to finish up cleaning our Editing Office (where we tend to hoard the most things). In our home we already Marie Kondo-ed our living room, bedroom, and a good portion of our kitchen, but have yet to tackle our living room, basement, dining room, and guest bedroom, though we hope to tackle all of those throughout January. It feels mentally more peaceful when the areas that you occupy are clean and organized, so if you haven’t read anything or seen anything about Marie Kondo’s cleaning methods, check it out on Netflix!
Coming up this year in the next few months we have more posts about weddings, corporate photography, some wedding anniversaries to share of weddings that we photographed a whopping TEN years ago, etc. and we’re excitedly counting down the next two months until our first wedding of the season: Lex & Jessica’s Palais Royale winter wedding-!! We’ll be working with them on their wedding schedule and list of formal photos for us to capture post-ceremony, so we’re excited for these next steps making it all the more exciting-! We also have Engagement Sessions booked for this Spring from Chicago, Illinois to Indiana to Nasvhille, Tennessee, so we’re extremely excited to get to photograph those as well as all of the upcoming Spring weddings (& Spring Newborn Sessions) in just a few months-!! In the midst of all of that coming up we’ll also be going to Arizona in the spring (and possibly Bulgaria in August??) for our personal trip to see Jenny’s immediate family (& aunts/ uncles/ cousins that we haven’t seen in a few years) AND take our first BIG solo trip further abroad together. We’ve traveled ALL over the country together and out of the country together, but Jason hasn’t gone too far only making it to Mexico & Canada so far (having just gotten his first passport a bit over a year ago), so we’re excited for this next chapter in our lives amidst gorgeous professional photography work-! Keep checking back every Wednesday to stay updated on things and we hope you’ve enjoyed your first WEEK of 2019-!!
(P.S. It FINALLY snowed here for the first time ALL winter TODAY-!! It’s been well over a month since we had snow in the November autumn days and it’s been sadly brown and gross up here in the North a few hours from Canada. We’re so much happier seeing the beautiful white snow and we hope that it sticks/ continues to snow throughout the rest of the next 2 months of winter-!!)