An evening in the long grass
We started with about an hour of light left and no particular plan. A blanket went down under an oak at the edge of the field, and for the first ten minutes everybody did what everybody does — sat where they thought they were supposed to sit and waited to be told what to do.
Then the kids got bored of that, which is when it gets good. They started circling and grabbing hands and spinning each other around in the dry grass, and their mother stopped watching me and started watching them. The light came in low and sideways through the seed heads and lit the whole thing from behind.
The photographs I keep coming back to from this one are not the ones where everyone is looking at me. They are the walk back across the field, the three of them laughing at something I could not hear, and a quiet one of a mother with her arms around two of her children at the point in the evening when everyone had run out of energy at the same time.
An hour of low light and somewhere with room to move is most of what an evening like this needs, and around Roseville that is not hard to find — the oak fields off Blue Oaks, open grass, a park you already walk through on weekends. Family sessions run an hour for that reason. The other recent sessions will give you a sense of how they tend to go.
