So far I’m two families ahead in the pay-it-forward stage of the Roadside Families Project but to tell you the truth, I could do shoots like this all day every day. I took a ride up to Phoenixville today to photograph John from Studio 602 and his wife Cindie who are expecting their first baby in just a few weeks. However, Shelby and Maggie were on hand to round out this family and they performed flawlessly! John and Cindie were both into my ideas and so they’re really my kind of client.

We decided it might be fun to let John sport the belly for a few shots.

Like I said, this kind of shoot is the best! John Michael Cooper and David A Williams really had the right idea when they made a commitment to make sure us photographers had some family photos with ourselves in them. John and I are gonna be roomies again at next year’s DWF convention so that ought to be fun. Meanwhile, Mark Gardner is stopping up tomorrow to photograph my family. Stay tuned!

Being a photographer, I get to meet some very special people. While at the DWF convention in Arizona earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to meet both David A Williams and John Michael Cooper. Both are super-creative and wonderfully inspirational. David’s keynote speech about photographers being woefully absent in their own families’ photos brought tears to the eyes of everyone in the room. We all left with a mission in mind and that was to not only to make sure we leave our children with plenty of photos of us with them but to provide other photographers with beautiful and creative portraits of them and their families, too.

Just the other day, I had to honor of photographing the family of a fellow photographer, Julian Kornacki. We met up at Oakbourne Mansion in West Chester PA. Julian gave me full creative control and we had a blast!

Meanwhile, back to the hyper-edgy John Michael Cooper. John started a web project called Roadside Families. He seeded the project by taking photos of photographers that he knew and their families in his own style and then sent them off to "pay it forward" and do the same for other photographers. I paid mine forward before I actually got my own family photographed but I hope to remedy that soon and join the project.