Easter egg hunt

Every March and April I photograph Easter egg hunts and I absolutely love how much fun they are and how we always get really beautiful photos. The kids have a blast and their families get lovely photos to hang on the walls of their home or office.

I started photographing Easter egg hunts at my mom and dad’s house on 2 acres in Gilbert ten years ago, and now I mostly photograph them at the Queen Creek Wash in Queen Creek, at Nichols Park in Gilbert, and Veterans Oasis Park in Chandler.

Parents dress their kiddos up in their cute spring outfits (sometimes frilly beautiful dresses and cute bow ties, other times much more casual) and we meet up for the kids to get portraits and then to do the Easter egg hunt. I like getting the really cool eggs - every year there are different types of pretty sparkly eggs to buy from Target.

So first we snap some beautiful portraits - the type you can hang on your walls of your home - and then I tell the kids I am going to count to 3 and say “Go!” and they can run around collecting the eggs. Sometimes I put candy in the eggs, sometimes not - it just depends on the preference of the parents.

I met up with these three siblings and their mom and dad at the Queen Creek Wash. Their outfits are just so cute! Scroll through to see the photos we got!

If you’d like to be part of the Easter egg hunts in 2023, scroll down to the form below and I will put you on my list to be contacted in early 2023.

Want to find out about Easter egg hunts next year? Fill out the form and I will email you with info for future Easter egg hunt photo shoots.

Carly at the Valley of the Sunflowers

This is Carly and her daughter at the Valley of the Sunflowers in downtown Phoenix. I organized a picnic at the VOS and told folks that they could stop by and get sunflower photos before the picnic, if they wanted.

This was back in the spring of 2012 and I was taking a break from wedding and portrait photography, but I was still doing personal photography projects and charity event photography.

I had recently downloaded the program Exposure Software. Exposure describes itself as “the image editor designed for the art of photography.” It gives you the ability to make your digital images look like film. At the time, I was really enchanted with the creamy pink way some film looks. I played around with the Portra filter and some other filters to give my images a creamy pink look. I was very influenced by the work of Elizabeth Messina Photography, who uses film and medium format cameras.

So you will see that in the way I edited these images (especially that last image.)

I gave these images to Carly and she gave me a gift certificate to her restaurant, Carly’s Bistro in Roosevelt Row in downtown Phoenix. I took a friend there and ordered tasty food and absinthe for my drink and found out that absinthe makes me feel sick, but it was fun to see what the folks in Paris liked to drink in cafes in the 1860s. I had been to Carly’s a few times before and I knew that I loved the place, so to be able to take a friend and get whatever I wanted to eat and drink was super fun.

I’m doing portrait sessions amongst sunflowers at the Rocker 7 Farm Patch in Buckeye this month. I will be editing them with my bright and vibrant style - not with this film style. If you would like photos of yourself amongst sunflowers, click on this link for more information.

Allyson + family at the Queen Creek Wash

I keep thinking about how the Summer of 2021 is upon us, and how this summer will be different than last summer. I will sit outside at restaurants, I’ve got that Pfizer vaccine, so I won’t feel afraid of doing photo shoots, I hope to start playing ultimate Frisbee again. I’ve been making a Summer of 2021 Spotify playlist (Perfume Genius’s “On the Floor” and “imma” by bbno$ & Lentra are the first two songs on there, if you were wondering and I always welcome hearing what other people are listening to) and I feel like I want to go out and experience all the things I couldn’t do last summer. One thing I would really like to do is meet up with other photographers and talk shop.

Something that I have always wanted to do in our hot summer months is portraits of people at the Salt River. Last summer, my sister and my nephew and I went exploring for places to take portraits and we found some beautiful spots. So that is one of my plans!

These photos are of Allyson and her husband and their children from September 2020. The first photo shoot I did for Allyson was in 2011 when her daughter was just a toddler baby, so it’s been fun to see her family grow. We all met up at the Queen Creek Wash and when I got there I was a little freaked out to see there was actually water running in the wash. I had never seen that all the times I have been there. It limited the places we could go for photos, but it turned out quite all right! After we got some family photos, the kids and their parents got to cool off in the water. And I did too. Which was fantastic, because it was a very hot-in-the-hundreds Arizona day.

That’s one of the reasons I want to do a photo shoot at the Salt River. We can all get in the water to cool off! And while I’m talking about plans, I will also share that I plan to do swimming pool photo shoots later this summer with my GoPro. You and your kids can get in the pool and swim underwater and I will take photos. These photos will be documentary style images, not the usual portraits I take.

I will be posting dates on Facebook and Instagram for those water photo shoots and you can also sign up for my email newsletter to be the first to find out about photo shoot dates.

Easter Egg Hunt at Nichols Park