Sometimes, clients already have an idea of the type of location they would like to use for their family portraits, and other times they come to me for suggestions. Sometimes, my suggestions sound a little crazy and not like a “normal” place that you would want to have photos made.
Lucky for me, if you are a client who is also my friend, then you trust me when I say “meet me by the U-Haul place off the side of the street. That’s exactly what Erin did without blinking, and I love her for it.
I happened to notice the spot when I was scouting for light before our session, and it just called out to me. I snapped the first two photos below with my cell phone, just so I could show you how ridiculous it probably looked as a location option. It’s really kind of a dirty, uninteresting stretch of road with a broken down old building, a billboard facing the interstate, and a parking lot full of U-haul trucks.
But on this particular day, the light, the clouds, the wildflowers, a little fence and the way the weeds were growing caught my eye. Now, if I go back in a few weeks, I might find the place completely uninspiring, but for Saturday, it worked. So I wanted to show it to you as an example of how it might look to you, versus how it looks through my camera.
For when scouting out locations for a portrait session, the most important factor is the light, and then a healthy dose of imagination to see what it might look like through the lens of the camera.
