On almost every photo shoot with parents of young ones, mom ends up getting stressed out with her child’s behavior. She has this vision of a smooth photo shoot with beautiful photos of her child, in their adorable little outfit, and then the session comes and what she sees during the shoot is her very active, “uncooperative”, busy child running around and it seems unlikely that we’re getting any good shots. I always assure mom that all shoots with little ones go like this. I repeat ALL SHOOTS GO LIKE THIS! I’m usually running around after them, looking I’m sure like some kind of lunatic making all these crazy noises and jumping around to get their attention. When the family’s images are ready, I’m usually met with responses along the lines of “oh my goodness these are beautiful, I thought for sure we’d have nothing, I love them!”

To illustrate this point, I’d like to share all the outtakes from today’s shoot with my 18 month old daughter, Addison. Let me tell you, she is one of the BUSIEST children I have ever met, and certainly a challenge when I’m trying to take them without some there to assist with child wrangling, but she did come and give me kisses between almost every photo, so it did come with it’s own benefits as well 😉

These are because I took her socks off to see her cute little piggies – she was trying to mimic the silly noises I was making at her to distract her from her feet and get a smile out of her:

A few weeks ago, Addison learned a new dance at daycare that includes “up and down, up and down” and that seems to be the theme of her life every day since:

Keeping anything in her hair to keep her bangs out of her face is a tall task, so half the shoot was spent trying (unsuccessfully) to get her to stop trying to take off her headband. I tried distracting her from its existence by asking where her belly was (I should have known better) and the next few pictures were spent trying to convince her to keep her shirt on:

And then finally, her dancing (aka jumping up and down again) and then laying on the floor to play “nu-nights”

While not all of these are “canvas on the wall” worthy, I love how much her crazy little personality shines through in this series. I know years from now the memories will fade, which is why I will be ordering all of these for our family photo albums, so someday when Addison has crazy children, I can remind her where they get it from 😉

Finally, here are my favorite “frame-worthy” images from our session: