Heather Neal Photography

There was a time when a session like this would have caused me to panic a bit. Mikayla’s mom contacted me about scheduling a session soon…the end of February, in the Midwest. The week before it was -5 degrees. There’s no green trees or pretty fall colors. With most locations now requiring permits for professional photography there wasn’t much time to obtain one. When I was first starting out this all would have given me a lot of anxiety. I’ve always wanted every session to result in beautiful images that my clients loved and I would have doubted myself in this situation. Not now though…Instead, to make things even more interesting I decided to suggest we shoot at a location I’ve never used and wing it. The photography Gods were pretty good to us and the weather warmed up almost 70 degrees over the next week! There was definitely some improvising. Since nature wasn’t very colorful, I found one little green evergreen along a sidewalk and it became our color. Mikayla brought cute outfits with equally cute shoes, however because of the recently melted snow there was mud. A lot of mud. So we shot on sidewalks and in front of a storage building or bathroom or any small non-muddy patch of land we could find to get some good shoe shots, and then we ditched them. Mikayla was a trooper for sure and not afraid to brave her way to the “good spots” and kick off her shoes even though there was still ice hanging around. These type of sessions that used to scare me, are now like a treasure hunt. I love searching for good spots that aren’t obvious to the untrained eye and I hope Mikayla loves her images for years to come and remembers having some fun while creating them!