Kingman Arizona Family, Child, and Newborn Photographer | Our Summer 2016

Today is the last day of summer vacation for us, and I must say that my kids have had a pretty amazing summer this year!  With our summers only being 8 weeks long now, due to a semi-year round school schedule, it felt like we were hardly home, but we sure had fun!!

I try to keep this website strictly business only, but I took my “real” camera with us to pretty much every place we visited this summer, so I wanted to share.

Sometimes the last thing I want to do is to lug my big camera out on our family excursions, but it’s so incredibly important for me to have nice images of my kids, for my kids.  We went to Sea World for the first time this summer, and I left it at the hotel, because it’s heavy and I didn’t want to carry it around all day. Definitely a decision I am regretting right now. Sure, iPhones are great for catching a quick snapshot, but the quality just kills it for me. For instance, check out this iPhone shot I took of Emilynn looking at the dolphins….

Ugh, it makes me cringe. Such an adorable shot, but the quality is awful. 🙁

I did, however, take my video camera with me, and I’m so glad that I did. Video is becoming obsolete these days, and that makes me sad.

My parents used to video tape everything, and because of that, I have hours upon hours of everything from my brother and I on Christmas morning opening presents, family camping trips, choir concerts, vacations with family, and a million awful 80’s/90’s outfit choices and hair styles that my 12 and 13 year old kids love to now tease me about! 😉

It is because of these “home movies” that I still use my camcorder, and not my cell phone, to trust to capture all of these memories with.  I feel the same way about my real camera, too, which is why I try and take it everywhere with me.

Our summer was awesome this year, and I am SO glad I took it with us, to document it for our kids.  My personal family shots don’t always get edited (mostly because I don’t have much time to do my own), but I really tried to edit as many as I could from this summer. I’ve also added a different watermark to my personal ones, including the year they were taken, to help me keep better track of them for scrapbooking purposes.

When I take my own personal pictures, I try to always find the extraordinary in our ordinary life.  I don’t want everything posed.  I want it to be real life as much as possible.  I love lifestyle photography for that very reason.  Someday my children will look back at these and remember the memories captured in these moments.

Anyway, now that I’ve rambled on and on, here are some of my favorite images from our summer….

These were taken at La Jolla Beach in California. I couldn’t believe how close these sea lions would let people get! My youngest, whom is a huge animal lover, was in complete heaven!

I loved how this one seemed to be looking right at me! 🙂

Obviously, the moon and stars aren’t real in this one, but I loved how my two boys were playing in the tent one night when we were camping in Williams, so I took a picture of it, and played with it in Photoshop when I got home. Definitely something out of my comfort zone, but it was still fun to play with it! 🙂

And, of course, one last shot of my crew on the last day of summer vacation. 🙂