There are very few mamas who genuinely one hundred percent inspire me to be better within my own four walls. Amy is one of them.
To be photographed by a bundle of women in a workshop setting is super hard, and she just soaked up every second with grace. Everything each photographer set up she would explode into choruses of “awhh! I love that! so sweet!” with the most genuine excitement, and it made all of our confidence skyrocket cause she just has that effect on people.
The woman just genuinely loves her people and her life and it shows up in everything she does, from the epic birthday parties she throws to the traveling and gosh just her smile. kkkk you caught me, I totally have a crush on Amy. Because, see, this is my struggle: CHOOSING to be in love with my life, over and over every day through the chaos and the lack of control and the growth and the fun mixed with the heartbreak. The people who seem to have that figured out–more than those who have zillions of awards or billions of dollars or millions accomplishments–are the ones I really admire.

 

And hey, if you’re a photographer interested in learning how to shoot families in a way that doesn’t feel contrived and terrible and instead feels exactly how you want it to, drop your email here and you’ll be the first to know about the learning opportunities I’m creating for you (and GUESS what you don’t have to leave your house to do it).

Email*

First Name

there are two sides of me. the boss lady side who eats marketing for breakfast and the poetic side who is in love with the sky and the stars, the ocean and the flowers and (way) overuses the word magical. Sometimes these two clash; sometimes they’re friends. sometimes i feel guilty that there are hot poopy diapers rotting in my garage while I sit here and carve out space for my own dreams. sometimes i feel so on fire with all the overflowing fabulousness that is the life i get to lead that i have to screech it out in a series of sing-song ‘yeah, yeah’ with some alternating squeals of delight.
 
morgan and all mamas who have businesses, jobs, main hustles, side hustles, talents and dreams of their own that they’re trying to balloon into reality–they get it. (and did i just describe all mamas everywhere? i hope so.) the way they see mothering and work out the TRY part–balance, needs, fun, light-heartedness and laughing at ourselves and the little people we hang with–it warms my insides and gives me hope that those lines between the sides of us, the hats we wear, the pulls on our time and energy and the pursuits we dream about will get to continue to blur and fade, watercolor together into a love affair with our own lives. that’s what i want for every mom.
 
because i used to be the frazzlefest who’d show up everywhere late and looking around like hey don’t you see, my life is so hard, look at this plate piled high with overwhelm, cut me some slack. 
 
then–i asked myself what it would take to go from surviving to thriving. from the inside of me. wanna know the answer? it was trying on contentment + massive gratitude–changing the way i think about mothering plus running a business, and giving myself back the power i’d given away to define my own success and love my own setup glinting with the same fierceness with which i’d wished it away.
 
so now–i am at home in the bigness of all of it. i don’t worry about a lot of things; i cut myself slack so other people don’t have to, i choose to adore my opportunities and know that mistakes and experiences and boredom are beautiful things for my kids to see and walk through. (and also–i’m still late. ;))
 
p.s., (don’t worry, i do actually throw the diapers in the dumpster at the end of every day. there’s just so many of them that at any given time there’s probably a small mountain accumulating, ya know.)
also hello. if you are still here at the bottom of this post and you’d love for your closest relationships to be seen with all the light, love, and hard freakin’ work inside them, i’d love to photograph your family.

i never need an excuse to fall in love with people, wholeheartedly, at first sight (just ask my husbanndd) and i realize it sounds cheesy but cliches are true for a thousand good reasons. i loved this family in .02 seconds. but i want to dig into the heart and guts of WHY.

secret: one of my favorite things about photographing families is the excuse i have to spy on them for a couple hours.
because i’ve shared many times before that family life is the hardest thing I’ve ever, ever done. leaps and bounds above anything else. it is work that is never complete–and while that feels beautiful in my artistic pursuits sometimes it gets buried in my work as a mother. also, mothering requires SO MANY things that i am straight up bad at. logistics and planning ahead and crazy heaps of patiently correcting and guiding with consistency. i’m working on them, and i see the shiny lining in the things i AM good at blending over into this work, but overall–gosh. i wonder insatiable how people do it. so spying on this family for a couple hours, seeing how they played together and handled the inevitable tantrums and I-NEED-HOT-DOGS-IMMEDIATELY and even a poo-mergency in the middle of a park with no bathrooms interlaced with the sparkly open-armed love they share and nurture–I left a genuinely better person. (which I realize sounds hilarious. it WAS hilarious. but that’s also the glory of this life we lead, right? That it’s all important and simultaneously very small, hilarious and gross and wonderful and holy? Yes, my friends, a big resounding YES. Keep saying yes to it all and unlocking oceans of joy for yourself.)

p.s. hey rad friend, thanks for reading and caring about these images. if you wanna be falled-in-love-with at first sight too, (appealing, right? I promise not to make it too creepy mccreepster) let’s make some photographs of you and the people you love most. contact me and i’ll send over all the deets for family sessions lightning fast.

remember when I answered the question, “But Brooke, can you make me look good in my photos?”
 
I adore getting responses like this one from Emmily, and yeah it makes my “told-ya-so!” button light up in a happy dance way because if you, mama, do not look good in your photos: I promise it’s your photographer’s fault, not yours.

“Brooke, you have no idea how emotionally happy looking at these photos made me. I am not exaggerating when I say these are my favorite photos of us.. ever… even more specifically – of me. And I generally hate getting professional photos because I’m so weird and awkward (but of course, you already know that… haha).

You’ve made me sentimental and full of joy this evening. I honestly can’t thank you enough. We love you and will cherish these incredible photos forever!”

Making moms feel gorgeous and like the best version of themselves (you know, the collected one who smiles lovingly at children through beautiful windows, not the one who yells and whose three year old says ‘we can’t go out because mom’s brain hurts’…wait what? definitely not real life examples here….) is a huge part of why I do what I do.
 
Our lives are full of so much–the whole swing of glorious-enlightened-super-mama to i-cant-do-this-one-more second and we remind ourselves enough of the latter. Photos are your time to shine in the most beautiful threads running through the whole vision of who you are and who you’re becoming. Sounds like a tall order for a photo to satisfy right? But photos have done that for me over and over, reminding me of my best self and who I want to be–for my family, for myself, for the worrrld yo.
 
Alright, I’m waxing soap-boxy so I’ll get to the photos of this family, with adorable busy totally two-year old cute cute Theo who’s crazy for cars and running water and running away (kinda like 100% of the other two year olds I know wink) and hard working loving parents (you must check out Emmily’s work, she is incredible).
 
ps one more thing:
 
Mamas, give yourself grace. You have enough time, energy, and capacity to do everything that is necessary. Not everything that you wish you could do, or everything that someone else wants you do to, but everything that is necessary. (And heaven knows I’m preaching this to myself as much as anyone.) The most essential will come through, and it will have your loving fingerprints all over it.

 

And HI if you’re still here reading you are probly interested in a family session and I would love to send you all the pricing + scheduling details so let’s chat about your family session, friend.

remember when websites had music players? and you’d listen to the song, and watch the slideshow?
 
somehow i became a crotchety old lady in the course of like 5 years guys.
 
cause i totally want to stare down my nose and tell you that photos are ten zillion times better with music and we should bring back those slow-loading slideshows and auto-playing songs you’d have to scramble to turn down if you went to a photography website when you weren’t ‘posed to.
 
of course before the slideshows with swelling songs there were prints that you held in your hands, albums you leafed through that had a specific smell.
 
with all the scrolling and the disappearing and everr’thang, i just want us to think about how we experience photos and how we’d really like to experience them. how we’d like to honor them, versus making them disposable. cause with all this technology-born freedom we are the bosses and it’s just kinda sad to think how we just let them slide into nothingness because we think we’ll do something with them someday but we never do.
 
we never do.
 
with that, here’s some photos you can scroll through. wry smile.
 
but while these will be scroll-through pics to lots of you, to this couple they will be the feeling of the last few days in their first house, before they moved on and moved up and moved away to new excitements.
 
(every piece of your story deserves that kind of honoring, bee-tee-double-you…)

 
and hey hello if you’d like to save your memories from iphone/hard drive/oh-we’ll-totally-do-that-someday death, I’d love to be the witness of the hard, hard work you do to choose love every day with your closest people. Let’s chat about your session.

Welcome to another installment of the “But Brooke…” series, where we call out all the elephants in the room about why you’re not hiring a photographer this minute cause you and I both know your life is BIG and your tiny moments matter but something–or a smattering of somethings–is keeping you from pulling the trigger.
 
Here’s the big one I hear a LOT. The husbands. Cute, wonderful, smart awesome funny hardworking husbands who would rather be doing anything, annnnyyyythiiingngg in the world than taking family photos. They’d rather be scraping their eyeballs out with a baby spoon, or standing in line at the DMV or mopping the floor with a toothbrush or any number of things that make me want to quite literally cry. That’s how torturous this thing is for dads.
 
And the confession is that I am married to one such dad.
 
One who blessedly does not complain even though he loves family photos about as much as I love taxes but we have been photographed by a lot of photographers and–his experiences have varied widely.

So why would the same dad who has the same distaste for family pics be crawling out of his skin during one experience and then completely relaxed (and dare I say it) having fun with another photographer?

All photographers are not created equal in their treatment of dads. Some ignore em. Some coddle em. A lot complain about em.
 
So I got to thinking. Do dads hate their families? Do they hate loving on their wives and playing with their kids? Acourse not. So why do they hate photos? YES I will say it–the nature of a photo session is sometimes the culprit. you know. stressball wife who wants everything to be perfect and the house and kids spotless and we must permasmile during this whole charade but actually our eyeballs are bugging outta our heads and when can it STOP for the love.
 
Beyond prep stress  (which I’m gonna address in another post–man I have a lot to say about all this apparently) I promise no forced permasmiles. But it’s not even about that. Let’s get into the real heart of the issue.
 
There are a couple of things us photographers tend to do that are a tiny bit irksome to dudes. And lemme tell you I’ve had a lot of practice on one such dude and if you have a man in your fam who is dreading the experience because he’s had some less-than-sparkly experiences in the past, I wanna say I’ve been there. And after trying to coax love out of my super-loving man (and oodles of other super-loving but less-photo-loving men) for photos, I know what works and what doesn’t.
 
The good news: you get to benefit from all my knowledge and (slightly weird?) analyzing of how dads roll during photos. The bad news: if your photographer kinda has no idea how to jam with this, you’re rolling the dice on whether you’ll get happy connected loving photos of your guy to remember for always or gritted-teeth-I-hate-this pics to die a slow death on your computer cause ain’ nobody want that on their walls.
nbsp;
Here’s the part where I tell you I’d really love to photograph your family whether your man is gushy or not and here’s where you can see more family photos to see if this is the way you want to remember your family. If you think it just might be, let’s chat about your family session. (full pricing + scheduling deets to you lickety split!)

okay i KNOW i stole that title but it was rolling around in my brain far too much to choose something else.
 
this is us, right now. (except there’s a lot more of jared and rio but both of those dudes do not like to be photographed so i deal.)
we are wiggling through mundane days filled with laughter and light and loss and lots, lots of tears. less of mine these days which feels even more amazing than i ever thought it would. i am learning. i am growing into this role and savoring more of their littleness, their wonder and their very conditional growing–the growing that has so much to do with my choices it’s choking sometimes, but other times the most satisfying thing i’ve ever been part of. to be needed so much. that’s what everyone wants, right? but then we want to run away and never be found…
 
here’s a poem i wrote about it.
 
motherhood
 
It is soaring sea and ripping wind
Every time I love you it starts again
Receding, cut through bleeding
Heartache wrench in skin
You are light in tiny forms
Blurring as it dances soft and wild in your hair
Flowers pick up the scents of our filled up air
Time
That flows then rocks then stops
Aches then cracks
Rivulets rolling through again
It is racing hearts and beating veins
Prickling against choice again
It is dropping, collapsing under the weight
Then flying together in clouds (I’ll never be able to describe the color)
Magnificence, depth, roaring so loud my ears can’t breathe and all I can do is smile
Full fledged upteenth time
Everything wrapped together
in a tiny
glorious
circular day.

 

If you’re interested in having me capture your “us”, let’s chat about it. Full pricing and scheduling details will be yours lickety split, love.

there are people whose hearts you immediately recognize because they share what feels like the same heart strings. the same view on living and the world, the same strugglings and the same optimism threaded through.
 
and that is the cheesiest, most true way i can describe these people you’re about to see.
 
do you have these people, who inspire you to love more deeply, more wildly and with more whole abandon? maybe it seems weird to have them be clients, starting with their thoughtful, handmade wedding. maybe it feels like i’m just hopping on the “i love my clients” bandwagon. and i am. and i do. but in a world filled with so many voices the great thing is that we get to choose which ones we listen to–and ayley’s is one with which i always, always feel my brain and insides expand. it’s wisdom, is what it is. and her kind of wisdom is full bodied and rooted in reality, which is a different feat than the dreamy kind of poetic.
 
so you can imagine how complimented i felt when she said this in response to seeing these photos: “we have words but they’re inadequate. thank you thank you for your eyes, your heart and your love. you capture TRUTH and beauty like nobody else.”
 
truth is inherently beautiful. the most resonant, basic and exalting things about you and the ones you love.
 
and ps–these photos were done in an “in between” phase in this family’s life. A couple rooms in a temporary place until their home is ready for them to move in, plus the darkest january inversion day. and I loved every ounce of it because this is their Now and that is more important than waiting for permanence or sunshine.
please stop waiting for (anything) to fall into place.
 
perfection is boring and all i need to make photos you love is people you love.
 
i’d say you’ve got that box checked, love, so let’s chat about your session.

Lemme paint a picture for you.

You’re all ready for family photos, your photographer arrives, and asks your kids to do something. And they don’t do it. Your parent brain cycles through the options: yell, obviously a bad choice right here cause don’t wanna make the kids cry for pics riiight! option two: bribe. yeah. you’re like, I got dis. “Hey kids,” you smile sugar-sweet, “if you listen to this nice photographer, we’ll get a treat at the end!” They’re like yayyay woohoo and you’re like yeahnailedit only…
 
they stop listening.
 
I’ll tell you why this doesn’t work–taking away the treat or toy you just promised quickly becomes an empty threat. You’re desperate to get your kid to listen so you bribe with ice cream at the end and then warn him that he’s going to lose the ice cream if he doesn’t listen…but actually following through if he doesn’t listen and taking away the ice cream? You’ve lost your only bargaining chip, and he knows it. Plus, ice cream at the end of a session feels sooo farrrr awayyy to kids. Desperation is never a good recipe for parenting or you know, happy big joy-filled photos. #smileorelse

Wait wait, so does all this mean no bribes? You’re above bribing, are you Brooke?huh? HUH?

No no my dear, not at all. Bribes have their place. I bring (unmessy) candy to my sessions and bribe with little pieces that kids get immediately after a certain picture, if necessary.
 
But here’s the other fantastic thing. Photographers of kids have oodles of tricks up their sleeves. We are a rare breed who thrive on chaos and you can totally hand the reigns over one hundred percent to your photog. If she needs you, she’ll let you know–otherwise, you getta sit back relax and enjoy the magic of lovin on your peeople. Okay, you caught me, ‘relaxed’ might not be the very first word that comes to mind when thinking upon the photographic experience with kids.
 
But.
 
I do promise to manage your kids and make sure that they do what we need for great photos–and it actually works out SO much better when mom and dad aren’t piling the stress of what the kids are doing on themselves. Enter more authentic kid behavior (laughs, curiosity, mischievous mini antics, oh it’s so good) plus more present parents who are able to sweat less and smile more. (I will absolutely take care of the sweating. my GOSH I sweat when I shoot. I’m sorry. The photos will be worth it promise kbye.)
 
And with that, I know that you want to book a session immediately. : ) Here’s how it works. Family sessions are done in your home + fave places. Some folks like to do just their house and yard, some folks like to do just one room of their house and their favorite park up the road. It’s places that matter to you, for photos that mean more than ‘that cool spot your photographer chose.’  Check out the details and book your family session here.
 
Also? This post is part of the But Brooke series, in which we call out all the elephants in the room about why you’re not hiring a photographer immediately and hash ’em out. Other posts include But Brooke…can you make me look good in my photos? and But Brooke…what if my kids are going crazy the whole session?