Katherine and Jon have been friends and clients for so many years! It was so much fun to catch up with them and their kiddo, who is a HUGE cat guy even though he doesn’t have a cat. He did like to hear about my cats and see their photos, and then he drew them a picture at the end of the session which was a bunch of smiley faces nested inside other smiley faces. Our cats loved it. He’s also a top notch superhero who excels at riding his scooter around the neighborhood, drawing the beach in chalk, and building Rube Goldberg devices with magnet tiles. He’s a super cool kid with super cool parents who have amazing taste in music and television while being the nicest humans. I love this little family as friends and clients – and there’s nothing better than that!

Kei and Justin have been dating for almost four years and wanted to capture some pictures of themselves and their relationship right now, just as it is, for no reason other than they love each other and want to remember this time in their lives. So they booked us for a session and we met them in a park a few days after Hurricane Matthew (our original lakeside location had be completely wiped out in a massive flood). Kei is an early childhood education teacher and Justin is in law enforcement, but despite Justin being a police officer, he’s just as light-hearted and sweet as Kei is, and together they’re two seriously kind people. They are really cuddly, really cute, and love each other a ton. And you kind of can’t help but get wrapped into their adorable looooove!

Although they went to the same high school, they didn’t actually get to know each other until Kei started working in the floral section of Harris Teeter, and Justin would go grocery shopping and stare at her while he ate the fruit samples (yesssss, such a good meeting story). They both really like kid’s movies (Up, Hotel Transylvania, the Good Dinosaur) and we encouraged them to look into the Last Unicorn although it’s crazy depressing (sorry in advance!).  And we ran around the park discussing good and bad television shows and our jobs and how spiders are the absolute worst. In the end, with everyone rushing them to get married already, they wanted to do some Ring Pop engagement photos as a response to the pressure. She then ate her ring and went home. :D

This shoot was so much fun for me (and Geoff!) to do! I became Twitter pals with another local photographer named Kristen (of Kristen Abigail Photography) a while back. A few weeks later I received an e-mail asking if I’d do the honors of photographing updated headshots of her for her website. I said of course! :) We decided to approach it as having a sort of senior portrait feel. Kristen is often behind the camera but not in front of it, and we could all use a personal photoshoot once in a while instead of just a few headshots. So we had a grand old time running around a part of Raleigh that I hadn’t explored before and got to spend time with a lovely lady! Kristen is such a sweet person and up for anything. I don’t think I’ve had anyone laugh so much on a session! She just cracked up the whole time and was as pleasant as could be. :) So without further ado, here’s Kristen!

Kristen’s nifty camera strap is from Etsy! Looove Etsy for stuff like that (and purses… and headbands… and..)

She brought the little daisy from home where she keeps a bunch of them in her room because they’re a happy source of inspiration!

Kristen – you were fabulous to work with! Thank you so much for asking us to do this. I hope you can use some for your website and use the others as reminders of how lovely and beautiful you are!