{ the Thomas's } |family|

I have had the priviledge of knowing Joseph Thomas and his family for many, many years.  In fact, we grew up rodeoing together, easily a couple hundred rodeos a year since we were say, 10?  His family may as well have been my own extended family.  As many of us rodeo kids know, when you screw up, all 20+ of your rodeo mom's have the expressed permission of your parents to come down on you hard. (Not that I ever needed it, but all the more reason to toe the line!) Anyway, his momma was a prominent figure throughout my childhood and is such a wonderful woman!  I've only had the pleasure of knowing Joseph's beautiful wife Jacqueline for a couple of years but man do I really like that lady!  She's honest, down to earth, and just a genuinely sweet person!  She trusted me with her youngest daughter Paislee's newborn portraits not too very long ago, and I am so honored to have had this opportunity to capture them as a family! Their oldest daughter Abigail, is just a beautiful young lady and a wonderful big sister!  I can tell she just loves her little sister to pieces!

We did have to reschedule once for a lil' old thunderstorm that decided to sit on top of our general area come time for the original session, but God provided us with a beautiful morning the next day and we were able to make it happen!  This family session was admittedly, a bit unusual for me.  Typically, babies of any age will really make a photographer work for that ever elusive smile when they are in a family setting.  Its generally not a problem in individual baby portraits because the little one is looking directly at mom and dad who can continuously make faces and smile at them, but in family sessions, the goal is to occassionally have everyone looking at the camera at the same time.  Now, as a photographer, I do keep a few tricks up my sleeves but still, with any child session, I expect to have worked myself into a sweat by the time we are done. Little Miss Paislee however, just smiled and laughed away the whole time.  I honestly didn't know what to do with myself.  Big scary camera, no problem for her at all!   Thank you guys so much for allowing me to capture your memories!  It was truly great to see all of you again and I hope you love what you are about to see!  You can click on a photo to view it enlarged.