Hey friends!  "Happy Summer"!  I use that term somewhat sarcastically because on the first day of summer in the Denver area we were graced with clouds, gloom, rain/thunderstorms and snow in the mountains - Ummm, NOOOOO!!!!  That was two days ago and it's now 80 degrees so I guess we may be able to safely say that summertime is here.

I thought to celebrate summer I'd do a blog post on a session that I photographed in the mid morning bright Colorado sunshine!  You may be asking yourself why I would feature a session that is outside of the time that I typically like to shoot (within an hour of sunrise and within 2 hours of sunset), but there is a good reason, so stick with me here...A fellow photographer strongly encouraged all of the photographers that she knows to purposefully include samples of our work that are in harsher lighting conditions so that clients who absolutely have to have their photos done outside when the sun is still high in the sky will have some idea of what their final images may look like.  And Mr. O's session was the perfect session to show off because some of the faces he makes will have you dying of laughter.  So here we go!  

We were celebrating Mr. O's 1st birthday and his sweet momma had taken the day off to celebrate and time wise it was just going to work out better for all of us to do his session at 9 am!  In some areas, 9am wouldn't be that bright out, but in Colorado, that sun is high up in the air and bright, which can mean harsh shadows and squinty eyes. So here's what I did!  I scoped out two locations about a week before, because part of the battle is knowing what you're working with.  Which way will the sun be coming from, where is there shade, and is it good "open shade" or tiny little patches of "speckly" shade are all the questions I try to see if I can figure out.  I found that there were large enough trees at Wash Park to create some decent (not perfect by any means) shade coverage and since Mr. O had just turned one, I knew he likely wasn't going to be out running me and would stay in a decently shaded area.  So I got there a bit early and set up where I thought I'd have the most success with lighting and did a couple of test shots with an empty chair.  The park goers probably thought I was crazy. 

A couple other tid bits...I had to really balance the dramatic lighting difference between the darker shaded areas and the brighter areas in the background and try to look out for all the runners and walkers typically at Wash Park so they weren't in every single one of my shots.  No easy feat!  I also planned to photograph in two slightly different spots so that if lighting didn't work in one of those spots, I had images from an alternative spot to work with.  As with any photo session, flexibility is important, and we found that out when we went to change the chair Mr. O was sitting in and his balloons blew away and got stuck in a tree branch high enough up that there was no chance we were ever going to rescue those balloons, lol!

There were some pretty dramatic before and afters of this session, so I'll just leave you with this one here...So if you ever ask to see some of the photos on your photographers screen during the session, they may look pretty rough.  But don't panic, as many times  when we are photographing we know how we will be editing them to balance out all the light and dark areas in the image.  

Well, ya'll when it's over, it's over, ha!  But I hope I have shown you that with a little fore thought it is possible to have a super cute photo session that works well with mid morning sunshine.  Now, if there's no shade that's a whole 'nother strategy for another photographer to explain to you, hahaha!