Spring has arrived in Sacramento and everything has become so colorful!

Flowers are blooming everywhere!  Morning glories drape the rustic brick walls of Old Sacramento.

The bushes at Capitol Park are blossoming with colorful blooms!

The fields and empty lots are glowing with the vibrant yellow mustard seed!

After all this rain, wildflowers are in abundance, growing all over the city!  But they won’t last long, so if a wildflower portrait session is what you want, contact me very soon!

If you’re wanting something a little different than the usual newborn portraits, we could have your baby’s portrait session out in nature with the beautiful flowers as a background!

Do you remember blowing dandelions as a child?  The parks are full of them just now!  Why not plan your spring portrait session at Land Park where the dandelions are in abundance?  Such a timeless, childhood portrait!

If you’re a spring gardener, you know it’s about time to begin planting your seeds.  What fun it would be to plan a lifestyle session at home of your family working in the garden together.

Doesn’t everyone garden in their pearls?

Even if your child isn’t particularly impressed with springtime and flowers, we can still capture some adorable childhood portraits!

Email me at naomiharrisonphotography@gmail.com if you’re ready to plan your children’s spring portrait session!

The year 2016 took me all over the counties of Sacramento, Placer, Tuolumne, San Francisco and Marin to photograph tiny newborns, beautiful babies and fun-loving children!  It was a wonderful, busy year!  I met so many great new families and saw again all of my annual clients whose children were a little bit older, a little bit bigger and a little bit more grown up than the last time I saw them.  This job is so rewarding and so much fun, capturing the amazing personalities of these beautiful children as they grow up!  Here are a few of my favorite images taken during 2016 portrait sessions.

This was not a planned photo.  I was standing on a chair to get a different angle for her baby brother’s newborn portraits.  She was standing near him, just watching what was going on, when she glanced up at me.  Less than a second and she had darted across the room, but I caught those gorgeous blue eyes and sweet expression!

I have noticed a pattern when I have portrait sessions with boys, particularly little boys.  They need to be moving, exploring, discovering!  With little girls, they are much more likely to stand still and work with the camera.  But when I photograph small boys, I need to make sure I have something for them to do or a game for them to play, and then I watch and wait for the rare moments when they turn their eyes to me.  With this little guy, we had ducked under some of the low branches that line the pathways of the Berkeley Marina and discovered a small clearing with this awesome tree that was growing out sideways.  He spent quite a bit of time climbing and exploring the tree and I took a wonderful collection of images that so capture a wild and free boyhood!

I’ve been photographing this young girl since she was seven months old.  Now she is seven YEARS old!  She has grown into a sweet and beautiful girl and it was so fun to photograph her once again!

Remember how I said above that little boys often need something to DO during portraits?  For this photo, I simply told them “I bet you can’t run down the path with your arms touching the entire time!”  They took my bet and won, haha!  But really I won because they didn’t want to take photos, but I made it look like they actually love taking photos, haha!

We had to do an all-outdoors session for this sweet four-week-old baby.  It was chilly and windy just off the bay and he was a touch on the fussy side.  But as soon as I laid him down in this cozy spot under the wildflowers, I could see his body just relax and he fell into an immediate deep sleep.  The calming power of nature!

I got to photograph this pretty baby every three months, from her newborn portraits to her first year portraits!  It was so much fun seeing how much she had changed and grown in those few months between each of the sessions!  These two images are from her nine month session.  Those bright eyes and clasped hands!  Need I say more?  Such sweetness!

Sleeping under the calming touch of his mother’s hands.  This was at the very end of his newborn session after I had already packed up my equipment.  The moment was so sweet, I just couldn’t let it pass without capturing it.  Mom just laughed as I pulled out my camera again, stood up on the bed and started snapping.

Brothers!  This shot just makes me laugh!  A real life moment of brotherly love, haha!

So simple, so classic, so sweet!

Red hair, outrageous personality and pulling funny faces at the camera!  This baby girl was an absolute blast to photograph and those pursed lips make me chuckle every time I see this photo.  Definitely a fave!

Okay, not really, lol, but I know every mother has those days when they are at their wit’s end and just need a few minutes of semi-peace (if not quiet).  Here are six sensory-rich, gloriously messy and highly-entertaining activities sure to keep your kids occupied for a good 30 minutes or more.  So sit back with a cup of coffee, try not to worry about the mess (most of these activities are pretty quick to clean up, just have a few rag towels handy for a wipe down and maybe a hose to spray off your kid afterward) and let the hilarity of these activities entertain you.

Cooking with Water

You will need:

• water
• liquid soap
• a variety of bowls, cups, scoops and funnels
• stirring instruments such as spoons, whisks, spatulas, . . .

Fill a large bowl with warm, sudsy water and set it out with all sorts of cooking instruments.  Let your kid go to town!  If you do this activity indoors, just lay a few large towels on the floor to catch the spillage.  Bathing suits are a good wardrobe option for this one.  As soap is involved in this activity, most everything should be clean at the end, so just give it all a quick rinse afterward, lay out to dry and you’re good to go!

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Sensory Play with Rice

You will need:

• a basin or large bowl
• a couple bags of rice (or bird seed)
• spoons, scoops, funnels, cups, toy trucks, sand toys, anything that your child might enjoy messing about with in the rice, . . .

This one is so fun, even I enjoy getting my hands in the rice on occasion.  There is something so satisfying about rolling the rice grains between one’s palms and hearing the splatter as a cupful is poured out; no wonder it’s a hit with most children!

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Shaving Cream Excavation

You will need:

• a basin
• a couple cans of shaving cream
• large stones or other items to bury in the shaving cream
• bowls for collecting the stones
• spatulas and large spoons for scooping
• paint brushes, small rags, bowls of water and spray bottle for cleaning the stones

For this activity, you’re going to give your child a basin full of shaving cream with objects hidden in the foam (I used large stones).  The objective is for your child to find and remove the stones and clean them off with the water and brushes.  However, kids will do as they will and, as the two littles in these photos did, they may come up with their own activity.  In the case of the little girl, she had a blast just transferring the stones from basin, to ground, to bowl, to ground, to bowl, . . . LOL.  And the big guy went in a whole other direction (which was so much fun, I’ve included it later on in this list)!  Definitely do this one outdoors and have a hose handy for clean up!

Play clothes required!

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Soap Bottle Fun

You will need:

• empty soap bottle
• water
• liquid soap

So as I mentioned in the previous activity, this kid has his own idea of a good time.  He got a hold of this soap bottle and had an absolute blast seeing how far the streams of water would go when he squeezed it or jumped on it.  Then he got into a water war with his mother, haha!  It was a ton of fun to watch him play with the bottle!  Fill it up with plain water and add a little soap or bubble bath for some froth.

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Painting with Water

You will need:

• a basin
• water
• paintbrushes
• paint roller
• squirt bottle
• empty soap container

This activity is low mess and great fun!  Fill a basin with water and give your child a large paintbrush or paint roller.  Your child can paint pictures on the sidewalk and then watch the painting disappear!  He can also spritz or squirt designs on the sidewalk with the spray bottle or soap container.  Just watch out because if your child is anything like this cheeky monkey, you may end up as the canvas of some of his artwork!

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Shaving Cream Play

You will need:

• a couple cans of shaving cream
• cookie sheets
• salt
• wide tooth comb, toy cars, spoons, ice-cream cones, small bowls of water
• anything else that might be fun to play with shaving cream

Spray some shaving cream onto a cookie sheet and see what your child does with it!  They can make tracks through the shaving cream by driving toy cars through it, use the comb to create patterns in the cream, fill the ice-cream cones and open up a pretend ice-cream shop, mix with the water and see what happens . . . .  To change it up, pour some salt into the cream.  It makes a great texture!

After the recent rains, the grass has turned to a rich green and flowers are beginning to bloom everywhere!  Spring portrait time is just about here, so I’m sharing a collection of spring portraits to inspire you for your own portrait session this spring.

Sacramento has many beautiful parks for a fun and playful portrait session.

Take advantage of the warm, spring weather to capture sweet baby rolls.

Frolic in the long, spring grasses.

The long grasses are great for ladybug hunting too.

Why not have a photography session in your own backyard, capturing your children’s favorite spring past times (chasing bubbles, riding bikes, jump roping or hula hooping?)

Do your kids have a favorite playground that you frequent?  Take some time out of your spring portrait session to capture a few photos on your kid’s favorite play equipment!

Let’s find a location where the bright, spring flowers make a perfect backdrop!

Dandelion wish-making can be a precious childhood moment to capture this time of year.

Let your hair blow in the spring breezes.

Smile!  Spring is here!

E-mail me at naomiharrisonphotography@gmail.com to book your own spring session.