You should do a regular session if…

• your child requires a long time to relax around strangers. If your kid hides her face behind her bunny for the first 30 minutes she’s around a new person, a 20-25 minute mini session might not be a great idea for you unless you really love photos of that bunny.
• you have a newborn. Newborn shoots should be done in the first 10 days of life and can take as long as 4 hours. You just won’t get the sleeping baby images from a mini session.
• your schedule isn’t flexible and you have a limited range of days in your calendar you can do a shoot. If great grandma is coming to town and you want a generational shot of everyone, well, what are the odds she’ll be in town on a mini session date?
• you want to do a shoot with lots of people. If you have one set of (grand)parents, 3 grown siblings, their spouses and 15 cousins ranging from 2-18 a mini-session isn’t going to do it for you.
• you have a specific location you want to shoot. If you want to go to the beach, to the river, to a fair or even your backyard you’ll have to book a regular session. I recommend going to interesting places, by the way. You can really take advantage of location photography is you go to a fun location like a country fair or the beach.
• you know you want an album or an image box at the end of the session. Albums are really fabulous ways to display images, as are custom boxes, especially in small, old New England homes that don’t have giant expanses of wall space or if you prefer to put paintings on the wall. However, you only get 5-10 images from a mini session and while that’s great to give new desk prints to family or get one picture for the mantle it’s not going to fill an album.

You should do a mini session if…

• your schedule is flexible and you can wait for a scheduled mini session day.
• you only want a few images
• you want to try out custom photography without making a huge investment of time or money.

We met at Hopkinton State Park during what is, truly, the worst time of the day for lighting. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, it was nearing noon and the trees gave us nothing but patchy light everywhere. Now, I’m sure you’re thinking “noon, sunny, sounds great!” but actually you get much prettier light outside either early in the morning or right before sunset. Now, I prefer to shoot inside a lot. Outside the light has this annoying habit of coming from all around but inside things like barns or houses I can get lovely directional lighting. However, despite the burdens of a beautiful sunny day I think these worked.

And, can you resist this look? Will anyone ever resist this look? The lashes, the curls, the gaze.

How embarrassing? I brought a stack of free postcards to the La Leche League conference in April touting the wonders of breasfeeding. I’d like to avoid that this time.

SO I’ll be doing a final proofread then send the file out to the printer. I’ll be giving them out to local breastfeeding professionals. You can order a personal copy as long as my extras hold out.

Downloadable PDF:
Please note that this is made freely available for you to print and distribute at will and am trusting in the basic goodness of people to use it as intended. Please respect that I retain copyright to these images and do not use them individually on your web site or in your materials even for the very best of causes. If you make the download available on your on web site please do it by linking back to this, original, post.

This file is very large so that you can make a very good print – you should be able to send this to a professional printer if you desire and have no issues with resolution, or just print it on the laser printer!