How do you prepare for a fall photo shoot with completely unknown weather variables in the Pacific Northwest? As a general rule, just prepare for any and all of it. Coats, vests, blankets, whatever is necessary for the elements. Will it rain? Probably. Is that ok? It all depends on you, but generally, I like some rain. Some. The day before I met the Ulusarac family for our Discovery Park session it had been absolutely pouring. I remained hopeful for our photo shoot as I looked at the forecast. There appeared to be a little window just after the time we were going to meet that looked good. At 6:30am, I emailed to try to scoot us out 30-60 minutes to buy us a little more time. No dice. They already had a full calendar so our time would have to stick. Cut to our start time, it was perfection. The fog had just barely started to lift, and there was a break in Seattle’s grey and overcast sky just long enough for us to have one of my most memorable shoots to date. It was autumn at its finest. Fallen colorful leaves and moody skies made for the perfect backdrop for our session.
When I first met little Ela (with one “L,” she was very clear), she turned away shyly. I’m pretty accustomed to this initial reaction from most kiddos, and I anticipated we’d be looking at about 20 minutes or so before she’d warm up to me. Wrong again. Within about 5 minutes, she had discussed her Halloween plans with me, told me all about her pretty dress, and most importantly told me about the Snickers that was in her pocket that her mom said she could have once we were done at the end of our photo shoot. Did we photograph that? You bet we did. In addition to being a little actress slash model in the making, she’s a big sister now, and that brought a variety of precious moments as I tried to capture along with snippets of the full family and some couplings. Mom and Dad had to get in on the fun after all.
As we were finishing up with the photographs, we were perched over in the field overlooking the Puget Sound. I saw a couple of drops hit my lens and looked over towards the Olympic Peninsula. Rain was definitely headed our way. Little did I know it would be so fast. We walked back to our cars and said our goodbyes and within a minute of shutting my door and turning on my engine a complete deluge of rain hit us. If we had changed our time even 15 minutes, we would have been soaked through. It’s never a dull moment around here capturing family photos in the fall and winter.
