thompson family photos // sharingwood, wa

“it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood
a neighborly day in this beautywood
would you be mine? could you be mine?
won’t you be my neighbor!’
-mister rogers

I recently visited this family in their utopia of a neighborhood (sharingwood.org), where everyone is neighborly & happy & involved in each others lives with shared gardens & monthly community dinners & a campground for all to share… it was amazing! It reminded me of Mexico almost, in that the doors & windows in the neighborhood were open & no one was afraid to say hello, and it was okay to be in each other’s business. I was truly inspired by it & found myself longing for a way to make this happen in my own neighborhood… and was even more inspired (& quite honestly surprised), at how loving this particular family was with each other. I love to photograph families, and these beautiful people blew me away with their lack of inhibition when it came to hugging, kissing, and just being in love with each other. When I showed up & they showed me around their incredble home, I asked if we could kind of have a snuggle fest—if this is something that they’re into—and they were like, “YEAH!” and proceeded to all basically doggy pile together. It was truly a wonderful thing.

There is one thing that I learned about myself when preparing for this photo shoot… once again, I found myself linking this article to the parents of this family {find article here} about the importance of moms being in photos with their children, because they had originally hired me to only take “photos of the kids.” I really pushed a full family photo shoot on them—using this article as a selling point—and finally realized that I’m really all about photographing families. As a whole. Whole families. I know that with my own family, that we are not one without the other, and I imagine that to also be true with the families who ask me to photograph their lives together. It was really an “aha” moment for me, to come to the realization that this is the stuff in life that I want to document most… people, with all the ones they love most.

Anyway, this family session just about sums it up for me, and I feel so thankful for that… Families. In love. On film.

{originally posted at CALIMA Portraits}