I knew when I hit this big milestone birthday I wanted to do a Self Portrait to commemorate the event. (shhhh If I tell you that i’m 40 now, will you still book me in 10 years? or maybe in 10 years will I still be in business? Maybe I will be one of those ladies with a long grey braid who travels around the world photographing Elephants. that would be cool, right? who knows?)

Anyway, I decided to do this self portrait shoot with my kids. And it was NOT EASY. I get it. it’s hard to be in front of the camera rather than behind it. I had to sift through a Ton of really awkward photos to get to the one I liked. Luckily I am the type of person who can laugh at themselves.

I knew wanted to get a shot of us watching the sunset on this lake that’s about 10 minutes from our house so I put on a long dress that I had crumpled on the floor of my closet, packed up my kids and my tripod and we went…. but when we got there, there were soooooo many people there. so we went a little farther down the road and tried a different spot.

I started out with my 85mm lens because I wanted a pretty sun flare which we got, but…..

we are like a mile away from the camera and we look like ants.

so we moved closer…

and it’s a sweet moment, but I feel like we are weirdly chopped off at a weird spot. I still love it though.

then here are some of the more silly outtakes from this area that was past the lake.

and this next photo shows a little bit about how I did these. I put my camera on the tripod, enabled the wifi in my camera and connected my phone via the Nikon App. then I would hit the shutter on my phone a bunch of times and literally drop my camera in the grass. here you can see my phone is literally in Mid air…. probably not the best idea LOL.

after realizing this was not what I had in mind for these photos, I decided to head back to the lake to give it one more shot. there was one man still sitting on a bench there, and while I was a little embarrassed in my long dress, I just sucked it up and he eventually left LOL.

Here are some of the outtakes from the Lake Portion of the session.

And I wised up and definitely did not drop the phone here so I have a lot of shots of my self bending over… that was fun to have to sift through.

and here was my final image. I believe it was the third to last image, the sun had set, it was 10 minutes until the kids’ bedtime and we were tired and frustrated. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best and didn’t really even realize I had gotten the shot until we had gotten home and put the kids to bed.

as a side note, you will notice that I toned down the color of my littlest son’s Crocs. He weirdly is like Mario Batali and refuses to wear anything but these bright blue crocs. I have no idea what we are going to do in the winter, and i’m getting super tired of editing the blue of his Crocs. Maybe we need to get a pair of Navy blue ones.