There’s a saying “man plans, the 405 laughs”. (I think the saying needs to be updated, maybe person laughs? or human? Do women mind being under the umbrella noun of “man”. And why do Californians insist on a “the” in front of their freeways? It’s like “yeah you Wyomingite may have a 405 but we have the 405. Ha! Not to mention our weather. Have we mentioned our weather?).
Anyways, some time back (yes I know how non-specific that is. I also foresee much of this post being parenthetic. I mean the best times happened parenthetically, no?) I decided I was going to try to move away from photographing weddings and towards booking more documentary family sessions.
Not to complain about work (seriously, that’s not the point, thank G-d for work!!) but weddings are hard. And for me, being that I can’t shoot on Saturday, my weddings are pretty much limited to the relatively religious Jewish world, which is for some reason insisting on getting married nowhere near me. Not to mention the stress, the timetable, having to cater to many different needs, the physical effort (I move around like a caffeinated monkey at weddings (no offense to caffeinated monkeys)) I mean it’s just a lot. Families on the other hand… You just hang out and get what you get. And if you mess up (not that I do) you could just do it again. And if the day does't work you reschedule. And you go to bed at night. And families are just fun. And you get to start all your sentences with and because you are dealing with kids who don’t care! Win win win.
So I wrote up a whole portrait guide, mixed my website around to put my family portfolio and images more prominent…
Around that time I was part of a group called Childhood Unplugged. We had monthly blog posts and each took turns hosting the instagram account (which has like 125K followers now). Except I couldn’t keep up :( So after a few months I reluctantly bowed out.
I figured I needed a few more sessions as samples so I reached out to one of the Ashley Jennet who is one of the local Childhood Unplugged contributors (members? peeps? grandmasters? admins?) who is quite the photographer herself with the most wonderful family (seriously. Check out her instagram and website), and asked if I could tag along for a day and photograph them. She graciously acquiesced. Woohoo!
As it turns out, as soon as I consciously decided to shoot more families, I promptly stopped booking them and started booking a bunch more weddings. Massive whatever.
(For the record I VERY much enjoy shooting weddings. In fact I’m often the last to leave wondering why the party isn’t still going on. It is, by far, my favorite thing to shoot. The whole before and after part is not as much fun (we can’t have fun all the time can we? that’s not a rhetorical question!).)
So here we have it. A random day in the life of the Jennet family.
Cuddles and snuggles, fighting and crying, beaching and barbecuing, some tattooing, and air in between (huh?).
Thanks for looking! Say hi in the comments so I know you’re here. Or lurk and be weird.
Peace, coffee, caffeine, and coffee.
