I almost canceled that session because a thunder and lightning storm popped up!
A pop-up thunderstorm rolled through Sand Key right before we were supposed to start, the kind that shows up without warning in July and makes you wonder if the whole evening is about to fall apart. We waited it out. And the light that came out the other side of that storm was something I couldn’t have created with anything I had. Deep gold, almost amber, sitting low over the Gulf like it had been holding back for exactly that moment, the clouds were still over the water emitting the periodical lightning streaks across the sky, what a backdrop!
Suzan Welch is a gymnast. A serious one. When I told her to just do what she does in her routines, she moved, beautifully and gracefully. Cartwheels in the wet sand. Back walkovers with the Gulf behind her. That thing gymnasts do where they go sideways through the air and make it look like breathing; she did that too. I kept shooting and tried to stay out of her way. When someone that comfortable in their own body decides to perform for the ocean during golden hour after a storm, your only job is to not miss it.
Then the brothers showed up. Seven and ten. It took maybe ninety seconds for them to decide they were also gymnasts. The seven-year-old attempted a cartwheel and ate sand. The ten-year-old did something that was more controlled fall than tumble but committed to it completely. Suzan laughed, the real kind, not the posed kind and I caught it.
That’s the frame her mom cried over. Not the athletic shots, as good as those were. The one where her daughter is laughing at her brothers being ridiculous on a beach at sunset after a storm that almost casued the session to not happen.
Sand Key does that when you give a session room to breathe.
Clearwater Beach and Sand Key are twenty minutes from most of Pasco County and North Pinellas. Crowds thin after 6pm. Light peaks around 7. And the summer storms that make you want to reschedule — those are the ones that leave the best sky behind them.
Senior portraits, family sessions, or both together the way we did it with the Welch family. Book it. Show up. Let it happen.
The light won’t wait and neither will this summer.
Book a session.