2023 Favorites – Portraits

Wait just a second, I shoot portraits?!
Shhhh, this is our little secret, okay?
Here’s the deal: I don’t advertise that I shoot portraits. You can look all over my website, you won’t find a single “portrait” session advertised. I no longer blog these sessions either! I used to simply post sneak peeks of my portraits over on my Facebook page, but as of 2019, I stopped doing that as well!

Maternity photos, newborns, kids, seniors, families – I can do all of it, but I’ve chosen to focus all of my efforts on the three things I love the absolute most: engagements, elopements, and weddings. (You know what they say, “Just because you can do it all, doesn’t mean you should.”) However, engagements, elopements, and weddings naturally lead to babies and families! So, if you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you’ll notice that about 90% of the portraits in this post are for people I’ve already photographed (usually on their “day one” – on their wedding day)!

In other words: if most of the people in this post look VERY familiar – they should! I’ve photographed some of these families every single year for the last 13+ years!! And they’re absolutely precious to me. They’re some of my dearest friends and I love them.

I think it’s one of my favorite things about being a photographer: the relationships I’ve formed through my business have held tight for years – it’s amazing and seriously the best perk of this job!

So, what I’ve found works best for me and my business (and my time) is that I’ve started holding “portrait mini-session days”. I reach out to my past clients and let them know that I’m holding a day of portrait sessions and for the past 6 years (wow, I can’t believe I’ve been doing mini-sessions that long), that day has worked out perfectly. I get to hang out with my favorite people, capture a new, updated set of family photos for them, and it’s all done in a concentrated amount of time.
Over the last 6 years, I’ve done mini-session days up in the Twin Tiers (where Derrick and I used to live) and in 2020, I started a mini-session day here in the Pittsburgh, PA area – where we currently live! (In other words: if the locations of a lot of these photos looks similar, it’s because many of these photos were taken on the same day, at the same place – in fact, it’s actually quite entertaining (for me anyway) to look through the photos and see how the light and location changes throughout the day!)
*Side-note: if you’d like in on one of my mini-session days, send me a message and I’ll add you to my email list! My mini-session days tend to book up almost instantly, so I typically don’t advertise them publicly – being on my email list is the only way to know when I open them up!

If you’d like to see some of my previous “favorite portrait” posts, you can find
2022’s favorite portraits here,
2021’s favorite portraits here,
2020’s favorite portraits here,
2019’s favorite portraits here,
2018’s favorite portraits here,
2017’s favorite portraits here, 
2016’s favorite portraits here, 
2015’s favorite portraits here, and 
2014’s favorite portraits here!
In fact, it’s really fun to go back and see how each family has grown and changed!

So, here we go! These are my favorite portraits from 2023 (in absolutely no particular order – seriously, I put all of my favorite images into a “randomizer” and this is the order it spit everything out in – how could I ever put 100+ images in any sort of order?)

If you missed my other 2023 “favorite” image posts, be sure to check them out here:
Favorite Wedding Images
Favorite Engagement Images
Stay tuned! My favorite roller coaster images are coming up next!