ETA: 4 years later, Stephanie is still the best family/portrait photographer I've ever found. Her…read morepictures speak for themselves.
We have a 6 year old and a 16 month old, so we've been to plenty of professional photographers, and take a lot of photographs of the kids ourselves on our digital SLR. I have to say that for us, Stephanie absolutely reinvented the wheel in terms of the way she approached our holiday photo session and the results. I've never been happier with photographs taken of my kids, and I can say that hand on heart.
When I took our holiday card photos in past years, they never turned out quite right. Other photographers would take pictures of my daughter on similar backgrounds, in similar poses.. But nice pictures, no flubs or weird expressions - which is what I was hoping for for our 2009 holiday card. Stephanie Howard offers clients the opportunity to buy digital files of their favorite images to use for prints or cards, which was a big draw for us but I mostly just wanted someone *else* to have to worry about posing them just right. After all, we needed a great shot of a kindergartener with a then 6 month old who couldn't do much of anything. In every shot I tried to take, the baby looked like he was desperately trying to stage an escape from his sister's arms!
When we met Stephanie at a local park for the session, she was very friendly, but also pretty quiet and unassuming. We expected her to give out instructions on how she wanted to do things, where we should have the children sit, etc. She did none of this, which threw us a little. She asked us to hang out but not interact too much with the kids, so she watched them do their thing and followed with a camera. This made us nervous, because we didn't notice her deliberately posing anything at all. In retrospect, she let the children be themselves and removed them from our expectation of what the pictures would be. She stopped us from trying to stage the pictures, and just photographed what she saw. I guess as parents, and every day photographers of our families, we try to create great pictures, instead of just focusing on the people and letting go of control.
When we got in our car after that session, my husband was convinced that we hadn't gotten the shots we wanted or needed. He'd been trying to tell our daughter how to pose for the pictures, but instead, she was off climbing on tree branches, and rolling on the grass with the baby. I don't think either of us realized the moments that we were missing, but Stephanie and her camera caught it all. Waiting for the online proofs was hard, but once we saw them, we were amazed.
Instead of the deliberately posed shots we were used to, usually with my daughter smiling and looking at the camera, we got to see beautiful photographs of genuine moments between the two children. Nothing forced, nothing formulaic or contrived. The colors, framing and focus of each shot were all perfect, but what was most striking to us was that Stephanie had managed to capture the unique qualities and energy of each of the kids, separate and together without making a big deal of it. Every picture had a mood or feeling that came through loud and clear and seemed absolutely natural in every way. Shouldn't something so amazing look like it takes a lot of hard work? To me, it was as if she'd worked magic but what Stephanie did was the opposite of what most of us do when we're trying to take a picture.
She simply let them be themselves, behaving naturally and instead of trying to direct them to do something, she just waited for it to happen. And took the picture.
I wish I could show you my favorite photograph from that session, because I have it hanging in my hallway now. It's of my daughter, hair all over the place, laying in the grass and laughing at the chubby baby facing her and grinning back. It's a lot of joy for one little photograph, and it's unbelievably perfect to me. I'm so glad we took those pictures and look forward to taking more with this photographer as the kids get older.
