How Spontaneity and Serendipity Were a Family Photographer’s Best Friend

“I have a hard time deciphering what it means to be shooting professionally,” says California-based wedding, family and commercial photographer Ashley Jennett (of The Stork and the Beanstalk), discussing how she became a photographer. 

“I’ve been shooting for as long as I can remember. In grade school, I went on a class trip across the country and my parents received a call that I had spent all the money they had sent me with; I used it on disposable cameras. I have distinct memories from growing up of lining my cabbage patch kids up for a photograph. I fell into family photography when I became a mother and took to photographing my own kids. I guess photography has always followed me in that sense; where I go, it goes.”

Photo © The Stork and the Beanstalk

This is the very last frame Jennett took for fellow photographer Kelsey Gerhard and her family. The orange glow of the afternoon light was fading into a soft sunset, and Jennett didn’t have much time for her portraits before darkness subsumed her session. They began packing up for the day when Jennett noticed Gerhard’s daughter Luella hanging back near the water’s edge, dancing. 

“I snuck down there and snapped just a few more shots of her,” she recounts. “This light, by the way, is my favorite to shoot in; so beautiful and yet so fleeting—so beautiful, I suppose, because it’s so fleeting. I shot this with my 35mm lens at f/1.4, which in hindsight was way too open, a shutter speed of 1/250, which in hindsight should have been a bit faster. I think it’s fair to say that I’m lucky it turned out.”

THE SHOT
Camera: Canon 5D Mark III  
Lens: 35mm  
Exposure: f/1.4 at 1/250 sec  
ISO: 800

RELATED LINKS

Finessing the Fine Art of Family Photography

Light Reading: Harnessing the Best Storytelling Moments

“Haru and Mina” by Hideaki Hamada, A Father’s Photographic Ode to His Children