Family Photo Friday: Portrait Session

When we lived in grandma's house, I'd say it took me about a year to be comfortable rearranging much of anything in the house.  The house had remained the same or had changed so gradually over the years that it just felt wrong.  The pictures on grandma's buffet stopped at our senior years in high school because that was the last formal picture we had taken and (our parents) had printed on a 5x7 and shipped off for grandma's frames.  When I decided to update those pictures (and include James family!) I found a treasured stack of formal shots tucked into each frame, including these ones from my baby/toddlerhood.  Mom must have had an in with the photo studio because boy did we have a lot of portraits taken!    I figure I have one more batch to share while I was kinda cute until we get to my super awkward phase from age 10 through 30+, including the year I cried right before pictures because I got in trouble for leaving my book in my desk on my way to the nerd reading group.   Oh yeah, and I was wearing ridiculously large Hammer pants overalls because I was super stylish :-)

  I won't lie, these pics make me a little nostalgic for the good old portrait photo shoot.  As natural light photography and photojournalistic style shoots are all the rage here, we've opted for outdoor photo shoots (which tend to be pricier so we do them far less often) over the sit and smile portrait studio.    However, there's still something nice about having that one picture where everyone is smiling and looking at the camera, cheesy background or not.   You can mock the portrait studio pictures of the 80s and 90s all you want but it still seems far better than the early 1900s "look at the camera and scowl" era:

(On the back is written: "left to right: my uncle & wife: Frank in Neza Setina: last couple")

Which my dad's family was exceptionally good at:

(My grandma, her brothers and her parents)

*Editor's Notes: In my last post Matthew took a pic of a water buffalo not a wildebeest.  Also, the cute blonde boy in the pictures before was my husband, even though my rambling made that unclear. 

Should I ever again in this lifetime sleep 8 straight hours, I will knock your socks off with a clearly thought out, error free and non-rambling post that is also factually accurate.  Hopefully the internet will still exist when that miraculous moment occurs.