I recently had the opportunity to take maternity photos for my friends Mary and Terry at Alviso Marina County Park, just on the edge of the bay near Mountain View. I was so excited for many reasons: I've wanted to shoot at the location for months, I love working with couples, and of course I love working with such fun people!

As a self-labeled "sneaker family," one of the first things they wanted were some fun tiny-shoe shots, and they were very well prepared with matching squeaky-clean Nikes. I love how they chose this unique, fun aspect of their family to highlight in the photos!

As soon as we finished the shoe photos and started taking photos of them together, they embraced the whole experience and were laughing, playful, easygoing, and so much fun to work with. Who knew that walking down a simple path could be so fun? Check out some of these fun, candid style photos we got!

Outfits. on. point. They had coordinated two different outfits perfectly, and after we got some of the more casual photos out of the way it was time for the wardrobe change. It's amazing how this simple change brought a whole different feel to the photos, while they still capture the fun and playful energy from this young family.

One thing we hadn't planned on was that as the sun came down, the bugs came out! Tons of little flies in mini-swarms started popping up, but thankfully they weren't too annoying and there weren't any mosquitoes. One really cool effect of the light with all the bugs flying around was it made them look almost like fireflies! We tried to find patches of path where there were fewer flies, but we still inevitably got them in a few of the photos. What do you think of this effect?

We had been timing everything toward sunset to get that golden hour sunset light, but did you know that there's some amazing light to be had right *after* sunset too? It had been a long session so they were sitting on this bench, and the light turned creamy smooth for a brand new look. These photos were about 5 minutes after the last set, but look at how different they come out!

Have I mentioned these two were fun to work with? Directly behind us from those bench photos, the sky was doing its thing just after sunset, so I asked them to hang around for one more creative shot with some lighting. Thankfully we had an extra set of hands (thank you, Summer!) to hold the flash, and a quick minute later we had something fun and different to show off the late sunset.

Well thats a wrap! I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it and of course taking the photos!