COACHELLA INSPIRED MATERNITY

We have these friends, my husband and I. We met them when we moved to South Florida and pretty quickly realized that we were going to hang out with them. A lot. They are the kind of family that you wonder how you did life without them before you met them. Those kind of people.

There are a few things you should know about them. One, they make CRAZY cute children. Like I’m pretty sure both my kids have complexes that I like baby R more than them. This, of course, is not true, although it’s a close game to be fair. I’m just saying. You may recognize him, as this little person has been photographed once or twice before by myself. Insert mental image of me running around with a camera stalking him like a paparazzi as his personal fan club here…

The other important thing to know is that my dear friend, Melissa, is my number one fashion mentor/inspiration/critic. She’s taught me all I know. She told me I had to embrace high heels and showed me how to obsessively stalk clearance sales of brands I love. Sigh. This is the woman that when I came to see the baby, her on Christmas eve, her first words to me were, “I hope you have shoes in the car. You’re not wearing those to church, are you????” Sigh.

So when we’re planning a lifestyle maternity or editorial type family photography session, I get pretty excited. However THIS was the session that went all wrong. Like, ALL of it wrong. We had planned a black tie family portrait session, complete with nice shoes and a bow tie for the baby. I’ll repeat, a bowtie for the baby. The night before our session, it did one of those, ‘hello I’m south Florida and I do whatever I feel like storms’ where I was pretty sure we were in a hurricane and no one told me. We talked about canceling but we were getting pretty close to her due date and I didn’t want to push it too far. We decided to move forward and brave the weather.

The morning of, in typical tropical fashion, it completely forgot it was suppose to rain all day and was bright and sunny. Great. I arrive at our location to see that there is a MAJOR fundraising walk going on. So like 1,000 people there. This is especially ironic because the last time I planned a maternity session for them, I wasn’t aware it was National Clean Up Your Beach day. That would be two for two. I called her and she told me that due to mud and high heels among other things, she completely changed up their look. Anyway, this was a perfect lead in to tell her I had just changed the venue, due to… complications. 😉

It’s funny but after all of those mishaps, I could not be happier with our final look and the images we produced. Sometimes, being able to roll with it and just laugh is a pretty big deal. Her final look was Coachella inspired fashion, which thanks to her fashion brilliance, they pulled off perfectly as a family. It was light and fun and very California music festival esque. The location I found matched perfectly with the look and feel of what they were wearing and was even pretty mud free, which is helpful when your family portraits include a one year old baby. I thought about photoshopping the Joshua Tree’s in for the full effect but I decided our Florida palm trees added a nice (and authentic) twist to the classic Coachella feel. 😉

Perhaps Christmas portraits will be black tie. Until then, we’ll welcome the SECOND baby R who made his appearance this last week! Can’t wait to start stalking that child. 😉

Enjoy.