First family portraits

We finally had our first family portraits taken on May 17, when Evan was about 9.5 months old.  It seemed to take forever to get them scheduled as finding a time that worked in both of our schedules and for the photographer wasn't easy!   We decided on a Thursday morning, when John is normally off work to stay home with Evan, and then I would just go into work a bit later that day.  Weekends were too hard since John usually works, and we chose a morning for better lighting conditions.  It was either that or an evening for good outdoor lighting, and I figured Evan's usually in a good mood in the mornings.  Plus, then we can all just get ready and look nice first thing in the day for the pictures and not have to worry about getting cleaned up nice after work/later in the day.  So we scheduled it for 8:30am, since Evan's morning nap is usually around 9-9:30am, giving us what I thought would be at least 30 good minutes of photo shooting time.

I really wanted outdoors photos with a nice lush green background.  Given our horrible drought this year, that wasn't actually very easy to find and I'm glad we did it in May because if we'd waited any longer into this hot and dry summer we may have missed out entirely!  We went to the CU-Boulder (University of Colorado-Boulder) campus since there are a lot of green spaces and big green trees, along with pretty stone buildings and architecture.

We hit the road from our house about 8am that day, since it's about a 30 minute drive to Boulder, all dressed nice and ready to go.  Things seemed to be going fine until we were a few blocks from CU campus and I looked over at Evan, only to find he had just fallen asleep!  "Oh no!  What would we ever do?" I thought as we pulled into campus.  Well, he easily awoke as we arrived and so I thought, "okay maybe we'll get lucky and he'll hold out for us."  And to some extent he did, as he seemed pretty happy for the first couple shoot locations, but very quickly he grew tired of this "hold still and try to look at a cameraman I've never seen before" game.

However, Evan didn't easily look to the photographer when he called Evan's name, nor rarely thought the photographer was goofy or funny enough to smile at.  I attribute those obstacles to the fact that Evan didn't know the photographer.  Evan's rarely been one to easily open up to strangers.  So perhaps we may have fared better if the person holding the camera was someone he knew, or if there was still someone he knew standing behind the photographer to catch Evan's attention.  Up until now when I'd taken him to get portraits, I was always there to make him laugh and smile because I was not in the shot!

Then with the fact that we were on borrowed time with Evan from the moment he dozed off in the car, we really got lucky that we got some of the shots that we did.  Granted, Evan really wasn't smiling in any, unless it was with me holding him and playing with him to make him happy.  It did make me feel really special that Evan would hug onto me a lot, as up until that point I didn't know just how much he would cling to me in uncomfortable situations.   Regardless, the moment we posed for a picture where we all had to look to the photographer together, Evan was back to being a non-smiling and a very squirmy baby.  I guess he looks more natural in the photos as a result.

Anyway, I've shared all of the final shots on Facebook, and will just share a select few here, since they are very large files.  I am pretty happy with how they turned out, even though I didn't get some of the poses I had hoped for.  The good thing is that we still have time for that...and will just have to try to have another shoot (taking into account all the lessons we learned from this past one) sometime again in the near future!

A nice family shot.

Probably my favorite family shot.

I absolutely loved all his cuddles!

This was the last pose we tried...I really wanted one of these shots of parents waist-down holding a standing/walking baby...but Evan was not in the mood.  Poor guy.