Eight Falls in a Row
The youngest one does not want her picture taken. She has never wanted her picture taken, not once in the eight years I have been photographing this family, and I have come to respect it the way you respect weather. It is just a fact of the day. You plan around it.
What her family does not do is fight her on it. There is no version of the afternoon where somebody kneels down and says, “Come on, just cooperate so we can be done.” Instead they tease. They get silly. Her older sister says something that is equal parts insult and love, the kind only a sibling can pull off, and one of the parents makes themselves the joke, and the whole thing turns into a bit that has nothing to do with the camera. And every year, without fail, by the end she is laughing. Not the polite kind. The real kind, the kind you cannot fake or ask for, the kind that shows up on its own once she has forgotten I am standing there.
Eight years. They have made this a priority when plenty of families would have let it slide, and they have shown up in some genuinely questionable conditions to do it. We have had shoots where my hands stopped working. We have had gray skies that could not decide what they wanted to be. They came anyway, every time, with the best attitude a person can have, which is not “let’s make this perfect” but “let’s just see what happens.”
This year, for the first time in eight tries, the weather simply cooperated. The fall color was doing exactly what you hope it will do and almost never does on the one day you booked. The light stayed soft and golden right through the end. I kept waiting for the catch and it never came.
The older sister has fed the alpacas every single year we have done this. It is the part she waits for, and the part I know is coming. If you have met an alpaca you know they do not hand out their affection freely. They decide about you. This year one of them leaned in while she held her hand out flat, and that was one of my favorite frames of the day. Her younger sister, meanwhile, wants nothing to do with them and will tell you so. Both of these things have been true for eight years, and I love that they are still true.
That is the part that gets me about photographing the same family this long. You put the pictures next to each other and you can watch these kids grow up in good light, literally and otherwise. You see the milestones, the missing teeth becoming braces becoming a young woman heading toward whatever is next. But you also see what has not moved an inch. The younger one still keeping her distance from the animals. The older one still lighting up around them. The way this family handles a hard moment by getting funny instead of getting frustrated. The milestones tell you what changed. The rest tells you what did not.
I think that is the quiet argument for doing this every year. Not the calendar of it, but what the calendar shows you when you line it up. Kids change so gradually that you stop noticing, and then one October you set this year’s frames beside the first year’s and the change hits you all at once, and so does the thing underneath it that never changed at all. Love does not decompose. An annual session is just a standing appointment to go remember that.
Their mom put it better than I can, in a review she left recently:
“We have been clients of Corey’s for close to 10 years. He has been photographing our family each year and does beautiful work. Corey never gets stressed out and helps everyone feel at ease. Having pre-teen/teen kids can be tricky and he always navigates their moods and gets them back on track. When our kids were much younger, he was so patient and worked his wit to win them over. We wouldn’t have family photos taken year after year if he didn’t make it so easy and fun. Having these photos are so important to us, an absolute treasure. I only wish we started sooner!”
Katherine
So to this family, whom I will not name but who will absolutely know it is them: thank you for eight of these. The weather owed you a good one. I am glad it finally paid up.
If the idea of getting annual family photos sounds good to you, I offer special rates, perks, and rewards for the families that do this with me. Get in touch here and we can talk about it!
