Amy and I had never met any of our Portland portrait clients before our photo sessions with them. We’d communicated with the families via email, but had never seen any of them in person. We’d arranged to meet Austin and his mother, Marty, at an agreed upon location, so when a mom and her teenaged son got out of their car and started looking around a little aimlessly, I walked over and introduced myself.
“Hi, I’m Paul. Amy’s over picking up a map of the campus.”
“Hi! I’m Karen and this is my son Jeffery,” she responded. Amy, seeing me engaged in conversation with what she assumed were our clients, came over and introduced herself as well. “See honey,” she told her son, “look how friendly that the people on campus are.”
We slipped away from these strangers as un-awkwardly as possible, but if Jeffery ends up attending the school, I think that I deserve some sort of recruiting bonus. Also, I’m going to make a Reams Photo shirt. And ask our clients to wear a flower in their hair or something.
We’re glad that we did meet up with Austin and his family a few minutes later, and following Austin’s senior portrait session, his family met us at the university and Amy and I shifted into family portrait mode. As most of you know, Amy and I primarily photograph portraits in San Diego, so we relished the opportunity to be surrounded by the trees and general greenery of Portland.
The Laytons are such a fun and friendly family-we really enjoyed spending the morning photographing them.
I just love this portrait of the youngest Layton, Charlie. To me, he just looks like joy personified.
One of the great parts of working together is getting to spend extra time with Amy. Sometimes she asks our photo subjects to do the most ridiculous things, which I think is exemplified in this little 2-photo series. Amy asked Kirk to kiss Marty’s nose. The photo on the left is the initial reaction. The one on the left is the actual nose kiss.
Even apart from Amy’s direction, the Laytons were really cute together-I like the emotion in this last shot a lot.
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