A fun summer evening couples session! Jenna is my husband’s cousin, and she and Gary were in town this past weekend for the annual family reunion. After a super fun lake day and grilling with the family, we grabbed the golf cart and snuck off down the road for a few couples photos, taken at the resort that used be owned by Jenna’s grandparents! A very special spot for a sweet couple, on a textbook gorgeous Minnesota summer lake night.

Couple sessions are some of my favorites and I think a part of it is the lack of pressure. These aren’t for an EVENT, like engagement, anniversary, annual family photos, headshots, etc. These kinds of sessions are simply for fun. For love. And it seems to remove the feeling a lot of couples have to Get It Right, and instead they can just have fun and goof off and love having images that simply capture themselves in moment of time. Ideally every session is like this, and that’s always my goal. But the reality is a title or special event that is the reason for a lot of sessions does create an air of formality that is hard to ignore. This is why I always encourage couples to book a “just for fun” couples session at a totally random time.

The same concept applies to families – the Annual Family Photo creates so much pressure to get the “perfect” image and causes a lot of stress for the whole family. So I encourage families to plan for a couple of smaller sessions a year for two reasons: A) You get to capture different seasons of the year (and life), and B) It’s not such a Big Event that everyone dreads. Instead its just another fun day or evening playing around and getting fun memories and photos, which is ultimately the whole point, right?