And here is the secret to the magic!  Drum-roll please…Pose for Candy!  A little title I made up for a classic trick.  These candies don’t cause drool or stain the tongue.  I had the boys literally eating out of my hand for over an hour.  I was a bit worried that this method would include giving kids way too much candy, but at the end of the session we had only gone through two rolls of smarties for two boys.  Not bad for having their complete attention for over an hour!

If you book a family of children session to take place in May, you will get the session and the 8×10 print ready disc for $350!  This is a $650 value!  I just bought a book about children’s portrait sessions (a very expensive book) and I want to try out the ideas.  So, let’s say you want to book a session.  Call me (or email and I will call you) and we will chat about what you are hoping to get out of the session.  I will ask about the images you like on my website so that we can book a similar session for you.  I will help you with clothing options phone and email.  The disc is for your personal use only.  You will still get a gallery for family to order from if they want to and it will be available to you for ordering large prints or albums, but if you only want the disc, that it totally fine!

This one is new, you pick the location (I will give you pointers when we chat).  I am charging $1 a mile for any location outside of zip code 97229 and I expect to travel since everything I photograph is on location.  I use google maps to figure out how much to charge for travel, so hopefully that will give you an idea.  Oh, and if you have a friend who wants to do this to and we book the session for the same day and location back-to-back, I will waive the travel fee up to 50 miles and if you have two friends (three sessions) at the same location, back-to-back, I will waive travel up to 100 miles.

This Month may book up really fast, so don’t wait to call! I am so excited to get some momentum taking portraits!!

The link to children’s portfolio and the family portfolio

My sister + field + pretty light + half hour

Let bake for 1 hour in photoshop

Sometimes I feel like there aren’t enough boys on the blog so hopefully this session will balance it out a little.  In the last session I did with the little girl and the lollipop, I had more pictures of her than her brother and sometimes I feel a little bummed about that.  In that particular case it was because he wanted to run around instead of staying where I wanted him to so the ones I did get were because I was chasing him around the field, ha ha.  You may not be able to tell in these pictures, but we (myself plus mom and dad) were working hard to get everyone together for a family picture. 

The boys sat here for about three seconds before they ran in two directions.  The one with Lorna is awesome because she is trying to make it a game and smile herself.  Before I took the picture, her son was crying because she had picked him up and he wanted to go where he wanted to go.  You can even see the tear still in his eye.  Aren’t his blue eyes amazing?

One down, but the trick was getting them both with mom and dad at the same time.  We let them do some separate to get used to idea.

Now we are all together.  Dad’s amazing antics get both boys laughing.

Yay!!!  We finally got everyone together.  At this age, I don’t even try getting everyone to look at the camera.  If fact I tell the parents to be engaged with the kids and just make sure they aren’t blocking your faces.  The picture on the right is hilarious.  I was directed by Sage to take this picture.

I loved Lorna’s boots and needed an excuse to get some sassy pictures of them.  These are so fun!  Since when do you get engagement pictures after you are married?

Sassy boots again, love em!

This was so funny, Sage is stoked to get on the trike and ride around outside.  He is quickly discouraged by the fact that it is very difficult to peddle on grass.

Keeping up

This kid has so much personality, overflowing with it.  Too fun!  I laugh when I think of all the times he tried to run me over and curve away just in time to avoid actually hitting me.  The middle picture shows him doing exactly that.  Do you see that mischievous grin?

Jude was just in keep up mode and when Lorna said it was Jude’s turn on the trike, Sage went inside to vent his frustration in time out.  Turns out, he had missed his nap earlier and that is just the way things roll sometimes.  It’s tough being a kid.

How could I have forgotten to tell you?  Lorna is a photographer!  Here are some head shots I got for her at the end of the session.

Missy Cochran photographs children’s Photography in Portland Oregon and the surrounding areas.

Our second adventure was that we saw Jose Villa at the trade show!!!  Talk about fanfare!  It was all Mel and I could do not to run up to him screaming and pulling our hair out Beatles fan style.  Turns out that there are a bunch of photography celebrities at the convention, but not only is Jose Villa our favorite, but he also spoke to a small group at the Fuji booth for about half hour.  It was a total coincidence that we got to see him speak since there are about 10,000 photographers at the conference and the trade show is huge and we didn’t know he would even be there for that blip of time.  His words were so inspiring and I love that he follows his artistic sensibilities more than he follows a proper business sense.

We learned a ton researching the products shown there which was the whole point of going and we found out that we love White House Custom Colors lay flat books.  They were awesome and I will be ordering a sample soon!

In the evenings we hung out with Mel’s friends who live there and who we were staying with to save some moolah.  It was so fun to see the dancing water at the Bellagio.  The city was beautiful with the crisp cool air and blue sky.  The huge hotels on the strip laid the foreground of snow covered mountains in the distance.  Minus all the corruption of gambling and scantily clad posters everywhere downtown, it was an amazing place!

On the way home we had another crazy adventure.  It was the afternoon and we were going north on I-5 coming home when a man driving southbound fell asleep at the wheel and drove through the median and foggered (referencing the old atari game) through a bunch of northbound traffic (us) and over the highway through a fence and into the fruit tree of an apple orchard.  How do I know he fell asleep, you may wonder.  Well, when he hit the tree, we pulled over and Mel ran over to the car while I called 911.  He was dazed, but had no serious injuries and another woman who jumped out of her car to help turned out to be a trauma nurse.  It was so surreal to see this all happen right before my very eyes and also to know that the reality is that we could have been seriously injured if the man hadn’t been blessed enough to miss all the traffic.  It was a miracle!!

Here are some more pictures from my kids session last week.  I am playing with some new actions in photoshop.  They aren’t that different, but if you want to, let me know what you think.