Anatomy of a Family Session
What really goes into an hour long session, from the scouting trip to the seventy-five photos that survive.
Behind the session · Orange County
Sun charts, tide charts, one very determined power walker, and about three hours of editing, for the sixty minutes you actually see.
You book an hour. Your kids are soaked and covered in sand inside the first four minutes, there's a frisbee going past somebody's head, and somewhere in all of that you get pictures you'll still have in thirty years.
That hour is real. It's also the smallest part of the whole session, and almost nobody sees the rest of it, which is sort of the point. My job is making your afternoon feel like it just happened.
So here's the rest of it.
Before you arrive
Most of the work happens on a day you're not there.
Every location I offer is one I picked on purpose and went and stood in myself. Same time of day, same light we'll have. A spot that's blown out and hot at noon can look unreal at dusk, and I'd rather learn that alone than with your whole family standing behind me while I figure it out. That's why I keep a running list of Orange County photo locations rather than meeting you somewhere I've only seen on a screen.
There's an app that tells me where the sun will be on any given day, but it only works if I'm actually standing there. I point my phone at the sky and it draws the sun's whole path onto what I'm looking at, so in July I can see exactly where the light's going to land at 5:40 in October.
Because light doesn't just change through the day, it changes through the year. Crystal Cove at five in October is a completely different beach than Crystal Cove at five in June. October light is low and gold and generous. In June at five it's still high in the sky, lighting everyone up like they're in an interrogation.
Things I'm checking before I say yes to a date
The tide. At spots like Crescent Bay the tide decides whether there's a beach at all. Low tide gives me wet sand that mirrors the entire sky. High tide gives me twelve feet of dry sand with all of Orange County standing on it. So I'm matching two clocks that don't care about each other.
Whatever else is going on. Surf contests. Sandcastle competitions. Somebody else's wedding. Three hundred people in matching shirts doing a charity walk straight through my golden hour.
Weather, sort of. This is Southern California, so it's mostly a non-issue. The outlier is winter, where it's seventy-five and summery one day and cold and blustery the next. And as we all know, Southern Californians don't take kindly to any weather that isn't 72 and sunny.
Then I map the session out spot by spot. Where we start, where we walk, where we finish, roughly what minute we need to be there. Not because I want a rigid afternoon, but because deciding all that in advance is exactly what lets me be relaxed once you show up.
And then there are the beach walkers. Arms swinging, elbows out, mid stride, absolutely not stopping for a family portrait. They've got somewhere to be and it's directly through my shot. I've stopped taking it personally. I plan around them the way you'd plan around weather.
What you wear
Your Pinterest board is full of white shirts and khaki pants on a beach. I know. Please don't.
Tan pants blend straight into the sand, so your legs disappear. A white shirt bounces the sun right back up into your face. Put them together at the water and the whole family washes out with the tide. Meanwhile your family is genuinely unlike anybody else's, and this is the one afternoon all year built for showing that, so let's use some color.
That's what Style and Select is for, and it's why The Picture Book shows up in your inbox the day you book. My editing runs warm and earthy, so some colors sing in it and some fight me the whole way through a gallery. Most people end up texting me a photo of things laid out on a bed asking what I think. Please do. I'd much rather have that conversation on a Tuesday than at the beach.
Now. Dads.
Dads are the hard part of this conversation and I say that with love, as someone who'd also default to something boring. There are two failure modes. Too stiff, which is the crisp dress shirt that makes it look like you're about to give a deposition. Or too casual, which is the shirt that's been balled up in a drawer since April and will photograph exactly as wrinkled as it is.
Two small things, mostly aimed at dads
Empty your pockets. Phone, keys, wallet, pocket knife, multi-tool, second pocket knife. It's a clown car in there. All of it prints straight through the fabric, and once the shutter fires that bulge is a permanent member of your family photo.
Lose the smart watch. Off a few days early if you can, or at minimum on night mode so it isn't glowing. The tan line, though, is forever, and there's no edit that makes a stripe on your wrist look like it was never there.
None of that is me being fussy about clothes. It's the same instinct as scouting the location and timing the light. I'd rather handle the small stuff a week out so that on the day, nobody's thinking about any of it, and we get to just have a good hour.
The hour
The first ten minutes are warm-up and I plan for them. Nobody climbs out of a car ready to be photographed. Your kids are quietly deciding whether I'm a threat, and you're wondering what to do with your hands, so you glue them to your thighs, because that seems totally natural, right!
Don't do that. I'll give you something better.
We start easy. Candid-leaning, with light direction and prompts. I've spent years collecting prompts and poses that get people moving instead of freezing, and the good ones never sound like photography. They sound like a game.
I have a system. The system is excellent. The system has never once survived contact with a four-year-old.
So I adapt. Every family's different, every kid's different, and the same kid is different on a Tuesday than they were on Sunday. The plan exists so that when your middle child announces they're finished, I already know which of the remaining shots still works and which one I'm quietly letting go.
Meanwhile I'm tracking four things at once. The light, which is falling the whole time. The background. Whoever's about to lose it. And whether your must-have list is covered before the good light goes.
You shouldn't have to notice any of that. You should just be having an afternoon.
The 600 to 800
Here's the number that makes people blink.
Candid work costs frames. That's the whole trade. If I posed you, told you where to look and counted to three, I'd need a fraction of these. But posed isn't what you came for, and a real laugh lasts about a second and a half. So I shoot through it. A kid running at you is eight frames. A dad spinning his daughter around is twelve.
That's not spray and pray. Spray and pray is firing blind and hoping something sticks. I know the half-second I'm after, I just can't get it in one press.
It isn't free, either. Camera shutters are rated like car tires. Mine's good for about 200,000 actuations, and every session spends a few hundred of them.
Then I sit down and throw most of it away, and that part is harder than it sounds. Culling isn't checking who had their eyes open. It's reading a face for the thing sitting underneath the expression. It's catching the emotion that isn't obvious on the first pass. It's weighing composition against light against color, a few hundred times in a row, and it's a genuine skill that took me years to get quick at.
Then the edit, about three hours. My color runs warm and earthy and I want a gallery to feel like one afternoon rather than seventy-five separate photographs. Some frames fight it, usually the bright sunlit ones from the start of a session before the sun has really dropped, and those get worked one at a time instead of cut, because it's usually a real moment stuck in hard light and I'm not throwing that away.
Your gallery lands in two weeks and lives online for six months.
Eight hundred photos. You keep seventy-five.
That gap is the job
Between sessions
The part with nobody's name on it.
The session names, the ads, the emails, the guides, the blog posts, the write-ups on every location. That's all mine. None of it is filler somebody else wrote that I pasted in. If you want the short version of how the sessions differ, I wrote that one too: choosing a family photo session.
I went to film school. I spent years on how light works, how a shot gets built, why one frame lands and the next one doesn't. It's been the thing since I was a kid holding a camera I had no idea how to use.
I'm still learning too, and I plan to stay that way. New lighting, new editing, watching what other photographers are doing and working out what's worth stealing and what's a trend that'll look dated in two years.
None of it shows up in your afternoon. All of it is why your afternoon works.
Why I build it this way
My mom kept a photo album for every year that my younger sister and I were growing up. When I was away at college, I'd come home and at some point we'd end up on the couch with those albums open. Twenty minutes in, nobody's talking about the photographs anymore. We're telling stories.
That's the part I didn't understand until much later. Old memories build new ones. An album isn't a record of a day that's over, it's a machine for making more days like it.
So I could shoot faster. Deliver 40 instead of 75. Skip the scouting trip and figure it out when I get there. But I'd rather be the guy who took it seriously, and I want the whole thing to be good, from the ad that brought you here to the last email I send after your gallery lands.
I'm not trying to sell you a session. I'm trying to be your family's photographer for a long time, and to build something like a community out of the families I get to work with.
The hour is just the part where you get to be there.
Tell me about your family
Family sessions across Orange County, booked a few weeks out through fall. Send me the shape of your day and I'll tell you what fits.
Start planning See the sessions