Documentary style, in-home portraits are a trend we’ve been working in and loving for a few years now and Christmas 2018 gave us the opportunity to be at it again. The Andrews are a crew we love and for 2018, they wanted their holiday portraits to be chill, and most especially, in their new home in Purlear, North Carolina.

We’ve had the pleasure of taking portraits for these guys several times before. The arrival of their second child, Jaxon, gave us the chance to spend time with them, get to know older brother Luke and capture several baby milestones with them – including his 6 month and first birthday.

Ryan told me that during this shoot, it felt like Christmas morning a bit. The boys were in their pjs, they baked cookies with mom, read new Christmas books with dad and dragged Ryan from room to room, showing them their new home. And of course, they talked dinosaurs – as one does on such occasions.

I find it impossible to believe that there were any cookies left when Santa made it to their address. We have some photos to prove that their were a couple of cute taste-testers.

We love these sessions for their intimacy, informality and our ability to capture the real moments of life, when posed shots just won’t do. If you’re interesting in a documentary style photo shoot (it doesn’t have to be Christmastime), contact us and we’ll work on a plan.

We love family portraits whether they are set in the studio, the great outdoors, a specific location like the mountains or high country, or on our property in our outdoor portrait garden. Pixels on Paper photographs, engagements and weddings, brides, and special events and portraits  of all kinds in our Wilkesboro, NC studio. We would be honored to meet with you, learn about you and your family and be a part of taking special portraits that will become, we hope, family heirlooms.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License

All photos are ©2018 Pixels On Paper. Do not copy, crop, or remove watermark.

While Christmas is in the rear-view mirror at this point, we’ve been busy and wanted to make sure that we shared a couple of our in-home Christmas portrait sessions from this last year.

People contact us for all sorts of reasons around the holidays; they want to have portraits made to give as gifts; they need images for their Christmas cards; they want to mark a milestone. A couple of years back, we began offering in-home Christmas portrait sessions and these more documentary in style for some, more intimate and in some cases, more casual. These have become incredibly popular. They’ve become Day in the Life sessions for the holidays.

The Spillman family (Elisabeth, Isaac, Barrett) live just outside of Winston-Salem and Ryan headed there for this session toward the end of last year.

I mentioned milestones and this particular in-home session marked son Barrett’s first Christmas and his Mom and Dad very much wanted it documented. They’re keen to capture all the firsts as a family and the traditions around their holidays.

I love the “coziness-factor” that’s shown in these images. Looking at the photos I can almost hear them cooing and soothing Barrett and feel all the comfort and love that surrounds him as they change his diaper, feed him and provide little cuddles and chin-tweaks. It’s real life and captures a still-life of life as we really know it.

We’re finding more and more that these types of honest, intimate, documentary sessions are the perfect mix of casual and professional. People want to use their phones to capture the everyday in life, but someone is usually missing from the photo and almost always some THING is missing: experience and skill. Ryan and I love to take the style of photos that don’t feel formal, like the ones that people hope to get with their phones, but we provide an understanding of lighting, composition, scene setting and comfort for our subjects that cannot be accomplished by most amateurs. And believe me when I say it’s our great pleasure.

We love family portraits whether they are set in the studio, the great outdoors, a specific location like the mountains or high country, or on our property in our outdoor portrait garden. Pixels on Paper photographs, engagements and weddings, brides, and special events and portraits  of all kinds in our Wilkesboro, NC studio. We would be honored to meet with you, learn about you and your family and be a part of taking special portraits that will become, we hope, family heirlooms.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License

All photos are ©2018 Pixels On Paper. Do not copy, crop, or remove watermark.