“But I don’t care about the location of the session,” someone recently told me. It was a stab in the guts, but I do understand; most families looking for a photographer just want beautiful pictures and as long as the location is pretty, they don’t care where we shoot.

But I do. And this is why:

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is defined by google as “a sentimental yearning for a former place or time”. I love this definition because it emphasises the important of both PLACE and TIME. You can wax nostalgic for a person or a time in your life when you felt certain feelings, but location is what gives those yearnings depth and vibrancy. The part of my childhood that I long most for have specific locations attached to them. I miss those places because I cannot separate what I felt during those times in my life from the places they were felt in. When you book a photography session in a location that has personal meaning for you, you maximize the nostalgic potentional of the images. As memory fades throughout the years you will look back at those pictures and the backdrop of the space will take you back there. When the location we shoot has meaning, you are guaranteed to feel nostalgia more deeply when you look at the photos.

Emotional Storytelling

Like nostalgia, emotional storytelling is another reason I encourage my family clients to book our session in a meaningful location. Emotive visuals can be conjured anywhere, but for family sessions the landscape/space in which the images were taken will explode with personal and unique storytelling details when the session is shot in a place that holds meaning for the you. Any photographer can take you to a sun-lit field and run you through their family session formula, but a personal location is what will create originality and personally emotive imagery.

Reverence

Our environments brim with energy. When you walk into a house, or a park, or even a neighbourhood in a city, you can feel the energy pulsating throughout. I can at least. The first thing I do when I step into any space is run an intuitive diagnostics on the energy there. Is it welcoming? Aloof? Is it warm? Cool? What images and emotions are lurking in this space? What evidence do I see around me that supports my intuition? How would this space like me to move within it?

When a client has no connection to a location, I can feel it. I wonder at the audacity of human assumption that we can move into unfamiliar landscapes, without considering the ecosystems, without reverence for the entities that dwell there, just for a pretty picture.

Before every session, I asked the Creative Muses to be with me. I always end my little prayer with “that I would not slaughter for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun” (which is a passage from the Odyssey called The Invocation of the Muses), which to me means, I will not take that which is sacred and render it surface and lacking depth. I believe that we do this (as photographers as well as clients) every time we fail to have reverence for a location and it’s energies. Our intentions matter, and whether or not we have reverence matters. If you have no reverence for a location, I don’t want to take your picture there.

But that doesn’t mean your session has to be In-Home

I highly recommend booking in-home sessions to all of my clients, but in the home is not the only place that can have vivid meaning for a family. Maybe you love your grandmother’s house and would rather capture the magic of your family in her environment, or maybe the park down the street from your house holds your most cherished memories. Maybe you are an avid hiker and your family makes frequent trips to the mountains each year, or maybe you grew up swimming in rivers and simply just have to do pictures riverside somewhere. Every person, old and young, has landscapes and spaces that hold meaning for them. Meaningful spaces hold meaning because they are pieces of your lived experience.

And that’s what I want you to have after our session together: images that reflect not just a pretty backdrop, but the essence of your lived experience. I want these pictures to reflect a viseral piece of your story.