If you’ve followed along my photography in any length of time, you know my heart is in documenting ordinary family life. My specialty sessions have been Day In The Life Sessions (all day sessions to tell the story of your family’s day), but my new program called Year In The Life is starting to become my favorite. They are kind of the same type of a session, just structured differently.
I am an older mom. My kids are now 21, 14 and almost 7, and looking back at our family life, the special moments in my heart are not the celebration days (even though those are meaningful too). I want to remember the ordinary days in between celebrations. I want to remember the crazy or quiet days when we forgot about school and obligations and spent time together on the beach. And the quiet evenings playing a game, having dinner with everyone still home, being silly at bath time and watching tv shows together.
Even the days when we didn’t get everything done, dinner got burnt on the stove, and I dried tears from my kids’ cheeks - I want to remember all that. I wish I had pictures from the ordinary days, and I wish I had more pictures of me in them. Oh, how I always felt like I needed to lose a few pounds, and I deleted so many pictures with me in them because there was always something in the pictures of me I was critical of. I still do this too often, but I’m learning to give myself more grace, as these pictures are not just for me, they are for my kids and future grandchildren. There is so much beauty in us and our mundane days, in all our messiness and imperfections.
That all is at the core of documentary family photography. It is telling our stories with us as we are. There is no need to dress up or put on cheesy smiles - our families are so beautiful just the way we are, everyday. Sometimes it’s fun to dress up and get special pictures of that too (and I do offer these types of portrait sessions as well), but the heart of documentary sessions are the real, honest, raw moments and feelings of parenthood and childhood. The highs and the lows. Both Day In The Life Sessions and Year In The Life are perfect for documenting the real and honest life you live.
A Day In The Life Session is typically twelve hours long, telling the story of one day. A Year In The Life Session is also twelve hours, but spread over twelve months. Most Year In The Life families will have 2-6 sessions within 12 months that add up to twelve hours, but families with newborns can have more than six sessions.
I love the flexibility of the Year In The Life Program! It is so tailored for each family. My first Year In The Life family had me come for five hours the first day, to document a homeschool morning - including dropping off and picking up a preschooler at a school where Grandma teaches. They still have seven hours to use up (they are thinking a birthday preparation and a session right before Christmas when their house is all decorated for the holidays. The second family had me start with one hour of horseback riding lessons, and then had me come for three hours to document a typical evening in their family’s life. My third family were expecting a baby, so we are doing more shorter sessions to document his growth. And yet another family to sign up for a Year In The Life Session is an extended family gifting Grandma with lots of professional pictures of her children and grandchildren.
Year In The Life Program can be a calendar year, a school year, baby’s first year - or have no special agenda. It doesn’t even have to be twelve months, it can be completed in a couple of months, if that’s what works best for your family. The way I have structured the program is with no hidden fees. You can pay all at once, or we can set up automatic payments. After each session I’ll upload a few sneak peeks (usually the next day), and within 3-4 weeks you’ll see your full gallery from that session. After we have completed twelve hours of coverage, you’ll have an online gallery of all the edited images from the year, and you can heart your favorites - or I can choose the best images, and I’ll make a professional quality photo book for you (like this one).
I have three collections to choose from, and all of them include the book, because I believe that is what has most value for you and your family for years to come. If you’d like to purchase an additional book to gift to a family member, it will be discounted for you.
Because I believe in having family portraits too, we can take more formal portraits at each session, if you’d like. Just make sure to let me know beforehand. It is possible I will include an image of your son licking his little baby brother - after all, I do specialize in the real and honest moments :-)
PS. This program really is designed for my local Florida families, but since we travel so much, please do reach out to me if you’re interested in it in a different part of the world. Let’s chat to see if we can make it work!
As always, stay well, and send me a message with any questions!
xoxo
Sennu
