What Fall Mini Sessions At Unique Footprints Actually Look Like
Fall is here again in St Louis, or it is about to be, and if you are a parent of a neurodivergent kid you already know what that means, it means the group texts start flying about fall pictures and pumpkin patches and matching flannel and somewhere in there is a little knot in your stomach because you have been to a session before, the ones where the photographer wants everyone looking and smiling at the exact same second, and you already know how that ends, so let me just say this plainly before we go any further, that is not what happens here, I already get it, that is actually most of my people, and this fall the minis are back, every Saturday in September and October plus the first two Saturdays of November, skipping Halloween because nobody needs to be fighting a costume and a camera on the same afternoon, and they are built around what your kid actually needs, not around what looks good on a schedule.
Why We Build In The Extra Time
Here is the part most photographers never tell you, the actual photography, the shutter clicking, only takes about fifteen to twenty minutes, that is it, that is the whole technical job, but I book forty five minute slots anyway and I do that on purpose, because the fifteen minutes of pictures were never the hard part, the hard part is the transition into a new place, the sensory landing, the getting regulated enough to even be present, and I would rather give your family thirty extra minutes to just be in a space before a single photo gets taken than rush you into a smile you had to fake your way into, both things can be true, this can be brutally hard some Saturdays and breathtakingly beautiful by the end of the same one, I have watched it happen more times than I can count, a kid who walked out of the car rigid and closed off, and twenty minutes later is laughing at something only they find funny and that is the frame I want, not the fake one, the real one.
Where We’re Shooting This Year
This year we are rotating across four parks that I have come to know the way you know a place you have walked a hundred times, Bee Tree, Tower Grove, Faust, and Forest, each one gives a different backdrop and a different kind of quiet corner to retreat to if things get big for a minute, because they will sometimes, and that is allowed here, slots start at nine in the morning while the light is soft and the parks are still waking up, before the crowds and the noise show up too, five images are included for two hundred and twenty five dollars, and if you want more of the day captured there is a way to add on more images or the full album at booking, but the heart of it stays the same no matter which option you pick, calm first, camera second.
A Few Things That Actually Help
If you are buying anything new for the day, do it two weeks out and wash it twice, so it already feels like a shirt your kid knows instead of something stiff and unfamiliar showing up for the first time in a photo, coordinate instead of match, let everyone pick their own comfortable within the same color family instead of forcing five people into one exact plaid, and if your kid has a fabric that works or a fabric that never will, no zippers, only soft pants, whatever it is, that preference wins over the outfit every single time, I would rather photograph a kid in their favorite worn in hoodie who is actually regulated than a kid in something new who is somewhere else entirely in their head. Since we are outside in a park this time of year, bring a layer, mornings are cooler than they look and nobody stays regulated when they are cold, and bring whatever else keeps your kid steady too, the fidget, the stuffed something, the headphones if sound is a lot some days, none of it needs to stay hidden in the car, it can all just be part of the session. And if your kid needs five minutes of just standing near the camera before anyone asks them to look at it, we have that five minutes, we built it in on purpose, that is the whole point of the extra time.
The Moment I’m Actually Chasing
I think about this a lot honestly, why I do this work the way I do it, and it always comes back to something small that happened years ago, my own son was maybe a year old, not a baby anymore but not quite a toddler either, he was on his tummy doing what babies do and I was just talking to him the way you talk to your kid without expecting much back, and then it happened, this tiny movement of his lips into a smile and his eyes finding mine, and I did not know yet that we would wait so long for more expressions to follow, I did not know it would take years of therapy and work to get to more smiles and cooing and eventually words, I just knew in that one second that something in me broke open and I cried, because it gave me hope, real hope, that things were going to be okay even though I also knew it was going to take time, that is the picture I am always trying to catch now, not the posed one, the one where something real breaks through, and I believe with everything in me that every family has one of those in them, we just have to build the kind of afternoon where it has room to show up.
How To Book
Booking is simple on purpose, we will find your Saturday and your park together, no long form to fill out, no pressure to commit to anything bigger than the mini itself unless you want to, this season is already filling in, and if this is your family’s first time doing pictures with a kid who does things differently, or your fifth time and you are just tired of bracing for it, either way, come as you are, we will figure out the rest together, walking alongside is the whole job.
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