Fort Steilacoom Family Session

A winter family session in Lakewood

For the past 3 years, I’ve hosted a portrait session giveaway to celebrate another year in business! The winner is always randomly selected, so I feel especially lucky that the winners have been such fun clients to work with! This year, Erica was the winner and she chose a family session with her husband Manny and their adorable daughter!

Erica was looking for a portrait location with rustic buildings and fields, so Fort Steilacoom Park made for the perfect backdrop. The park is 340 acres, making it the largest park in the city of Lakewood. It’s a popular photo location, but because of its massive size, it’s never felt super crowded. With multiple barns and a variety of trails, there’s plenty of space at this park! It’s also one of my favorite locations because the tall grassy fields photograph beautifully and the old barns add to the rustic vibe. We added a little holiday flare to the session too by incorporating wintery decor in some of the shots.

We planned to start the session at the barns, but when we arrived, there was a large group of Lakewood police officers moving a car in one of the barns. Thankfully, there’s a row of a couple of barns so we moved to another one so we weren’t in the officers’ way. One of the officers saw us taking photos and noticed that Erica and Manny’s daughter was a little unsure of being in front of the camera. He grabbed a mermaid stuffed animal from his squad car to try to cheer her up. He waved it around behind me and talked to her as I snapped shots. He gave it to her to take home and then hopped in his car and left along with the other officers. It was so kind!

After we wrapped up at the barns, we moved to the tall fields and snapped some of my favorite images of the session! I love the look of glowy light, especially in grassy fields, and that’s exactly what we got! This session was too cute — I had a hard time narrowing down my favorites for the blog. Hope you enjoy!

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Thank you so much for entering my giveaway, Erica! I loved working with you and your sweet family!

Hugs,
Monica