The Darnall/Mayer Family: Tempe, Arizona

On Sunday, we met up with Melissa & Bryan at their home in downtown Tempe to shoot some portraits of their super cute family.  They will be getting married in Maui this coming April and we’ll be shooting their reception here in Phoenix.  Rather than do a traditional engagement session, they wanted to include their adorable boys Michael & David.  They’ve been living in the same building on Mill Ave since before the boys were born so they choose the surrounding area as the setting of their photo shoot.  We super love that!  Its one thing for us to chose a cool location for a photo shoot, but it really means so much more when it’s all about who YOU are as a couple or as a family.  I totally love the fun interactions between the whole family as they walk down Mill Ave in the first photo.  Here are some more favorites from their session:

David brought along his friend Elmo to keep him company so throughout the course of our time together, Ryan and I traded off on “Elmo Duty” to keep David entertained :-)  He did make a guest appearance in a few shots though, like this next one . . .

Love this one!  It’s probably my favorite from the whole day :-)  How cute are they? SERIOUSLY!

These two make me smile :-)  Love the silliness!

A couple of portraits of the boys

They love to play softball as a family so towards the end of the session we decided it was play time.  Hit it out of the park Michael!

I don’t know what exactly prompted this next shot, but Ryan was watching David play and all of a sudden he put on this AWESOME little “tough guy” scowl and started walking slowly towards him like “hey man, what do you think you’re doing?”  He had been pretty shy the whole rest of the shoot so it was totally out of nowhere and completely hilarious!  Melissa and I were watching them and I swear we both got a little concerned that Ryan was going to have to make a break for it before he received a plastic bat beating.  But he kept his cool and just kept shooting.  And of course David ended up with a big silly grin over our reaction to his little display.

And of course, we had to take some cute shots of the bride & groom to be :-)

When we were shooting this next one, the kids were playing in the grass nearby and Michael yelled out “It looks like you guys are at our wedding!” which we thought was so cute and hilarious :-)  It got a good laugh out of Melissa & Bryan too!

Thanks guys for the lovely afternoon!  We had so much fun getting to know you and can’t wait to celebrate with you at your reception :-)