During this photo shoot, I had a revelation: intimate, at-home family sessions like this are my favorite kind of portrait work. The love and energy of weddings and engagement shoots are wonderful and I enjoy getting to capture a couple's feelings for one another at a special time in their lives, and other special occasions like graduation ceremonies and family reunions are also a privilege to photograph. But these family shoots are the closest thing to truly photojournalistic portraiture, because I feel that I am getting to simply document a slice of the every day lives of families as they grow.
This is the second newborn shoot I have done with Bryn and Cees - their son, Tobin, has turned out to be a charming, talkative little guy, and he's also just become a big brother to a new sister, Dide. We had to recreate a couple of shots from Tobin's shoot - Bryn and Cees have a print of one of their favorite photos from the shoot with Tobin hanging up in their dining room, so it only seemed logical to have Cees re-enact that shot with Dide, too. And, of course, placing young babies into bookshelves (the diptych photo in the gallery below has Tobin and Dide side by side) has now become one of my signature shots :)
