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Hiring a professional photographer is one of the most important things a photographer can do. And just to be clear I don’t mean trading with another photographer, I mean hiring someone and paying them actual money in the same way I ask my own clients to. It gives you a true client perspective, which is just a bonus to getting pictures with you IN them.
I am going to be completely honest. I really wanted to go to Disneyland, but I pulled the trigger on the trip so I could have a session with Tika Davis. I discovered her work in the Mastin Labs Facebook Community and right after I started following her on Instagram she posted the most AMAZING picture at Disneyland. SOLD. I immediately reached out for pricing information for a future trip, but then just decided to book a trip right then and there before she even answered. When we went to Disney World in 2015 I did a decent job documenting the trip on my Fuji x100T, but I wasn’t going to do that again. You can see I am just not in enough pictures in this blog post. Chloe doesn’t need her childhood documented as much as she needs to see me IN the pictures. As I sit in my living room there are at least two pictures with me IN them on every single wall in my house. Some of them are photos I took using one of my cameras and an app (Nikon/Canon/Fuji) on my phone, but the majority of them are from the eight professional sessions we have had since we got pregnant. It is work to take the selfies. I would rather enjoy the moment than think too hard about making sure I am in the pictures.
Why don’t I just have my husband take a picture of me? Because he takes the most unflattering pictures of me and it is about 25/75 on whether it would even be in focus. He took one picture of Chloe and I on Hampton Beach on vacation last year and I printed it as a 36×48 canvas and hung it in the house hoping he would get the hint and learn to take a damn picture. It’s honestly better for our marriage if I just pay someone to take our photos one to two times a year. I mean compare it to the cost of marriage counseling 😉
The day before I got our photos back from Tika my film scans from The FIND Lab that I shot while in California hit my inbox (image above shot with Nikon F100 on Fuji c200). I only used 4 rolls of film and 1.5 rolls were at the hotel pool the day we left. Obviously, I was not in a single frame because my sister is incapable of focusing my film camera. But that is OKAY because for the day Tika was with us I got to enjoy the park with my family and not worry about whether or not I would get some good pictures from it. We had a fabulous time in California and at Disneyland/California Adventure.
We asked the kids at the end of trip what their favorite part was: Chloe said the Ariel ride, Aurelia said the lollipops, but I said Tika. She was definitely my favorite part and I hadn’t even seen the images yet. This should be obvious, but just in case, the images below are all from her. Isn’t she amazing??? NOTE: I feel the need to also say there were more pictures of just the kids and my sister and niece, but this blog post is about ME getting in the frame so the images I selected to blog represent that. I mean I did something similar to this for Kayla when I went to visit and we did a day at Efteling, but WOW it’s amazing to be on the receiving end!
denver, dallas
& worldwide