Earlier this spring I was at Gibbon’s park here in London Ontario with the family. I was busy tracking my boys, getting shots of them at play when I spotted this cute little guy and his mom who also was sporting a camera. I asked her if I could get a shot of her son and gave here my website to contact me for a copy of the image if she wanted one.

That was how I met Amanda and her adorable son Brayden (Love that name by the way!). She contacted me via Twitter about doing a session with her son and I was more then happy to help her out! Brayden has one of those faces that just cries to have a camera pointed at it and I was excited that camera was going to be mine.

We decided to met up back at Gibbons Park seeing that there is quite a bit of stuff for kids to do and the park does offer a lot of different backdrops. Amanda asked if she should bring anything for Brayden and I suggest she bring some balloons. After seeing an engagement session by a California wedding photographer Bonnie Tsang, I so wanted to work balloons into a few shots and Brayden offered the perfect opportunity.

I normally try to keep my image count in the blog posts down to around 5 or so, but I really had a hard time choosing between all the great images we produced, it was all I could do just to get it down to ten. So this is a long one, but with such a cute kid like Brayden, I’m sure you won’t mind…….Hope you enjoy.

This time of year is slow for shooting, weddings don’t generally start till April and right after the holidays portraits are not a big thing on the to-do list since either people had portraits done for the holidays or they are still reeling from the credit card bills. Whatever the reason, this is a good time to dig through the pictures I have already taken and have another look at them, bringing them out in the fresh air to breath so to speak.

Last summer Tara, the wife of my long time friend Rob asked me to do a small family session. I guess she wanted something other then the portrait studio look and she knew I liked shooting on location. They were heading to a wedding the day of the shoot, so they all were done up in their best and looked great. We started out thinking of hitting up a local park to get some “picnic” like shots, but mother nature had a different plan for us and decided to bring in the showers to rain on our parade.

The day before I was driving around in the country and had noticed a field of freshly harvested hay, luckily I had remembered the location because we used it when the rain started in the park. We all jumped in the car and headed to the field I found the day before with our fingers crossed that we would make it there before the rain did.

When we got to the hay field, I could not have asked for a more dramatic scene. The dark clouds were coming in from the east, and the sun was coming in from the west which created amazing light and contrast. I really like the mixed setting of the storm coming in behind the family looking like they were… well heading to a wedding, having a little play time in the middle of a harvested hay field. All in all I was pleased with what I thought was going to be a washed out family session and I hope you enjoy the no so new picture.