2016 Favorites – Portraits

It’s the week between Christmas & New Years – a week which should simply be dubbed a holiday in itself! This week, I definitely won’t know what day it is at any time (Derrick’s work schedule is different this week to further throw things off), leftovers & Christmas cookies abound, Christmas gifts are heaped around the tree & on our dining room table, and relaxation is the name of the game.

There seemed to be no better time to do my annual “favorites” than during this very last week of 2016.

What an amazing, incredible, fulfilling, beautiful year 2016 has been! I took tens of thousands of photos and have gone thru the enormous process of pulling my favorites and compiling them into 3 categories: my favorite portraits, engagement and wedding images! I know I say this all the time, but I simply can’t say it enough – I am overwhelmingly blessed to be able to work with the most amazing people year after year after year and 2016 was no exception!

What follows are just a taste (in absolutely no particular order) of my favorite portraits of the year. This includes maternity, newborn, kiddo, family, senior, and anniversary photoshoots! It’s a lot and so it goes without saying that there are a lot of images in this post! I’m sorry, but not sorry. Every time I look through these images, I smile as they take me right back to the moment I clicked the shutter. I love that. Photography is so powerful.

Many of these photos are “never before seen” – I promise to get caught up by blogging all of my fall sessions in the coming weeks and months! This happens every year: I simply shoot faster than I can blog. And that’s okay! It just gives me plenty of pretty pictures to fill my blog over these next cold winter months! So, stay tuned!

If you’d like to see previous “favorites” posts, you can find 2015’s favorite portraits here & 2014’s favorite portraits here! In fact, it’s really fun to go back and see how each family has grown & changed (I photograph a solid number of the same families every single year).

Stay tuned for my favorite engagement images & also my favorite wedding images of 2016! They’ll be coming a little bit later on this week!

I promise not to talk about every single image, because I totally can, but I wanted to post this image of Hidey first. She was our friend’s Mitchell & Larissa’s cat & she passed away just a few weeks ago. Every year that I have shot their family portraits, I have made it a point to take a portrait of Hidey. I snagged this one of her just a few weeks before she passed away. Our pets are precious parts of our families too and they most certainly deserve to be photographed!