All Over Fish Creek | Marcie and Adam's Family Session of Acceptance and Change

In the last year Macklemore has become one of my favorite artists, and he wrote a song called “Drug Dealer” (a very powerful song that I’d recommend you listen to before being turned off by the title) that concludes with the lines:

So God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change
Courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference

I realize that Macklemore wasn’t the first person to say these words, but he’s the one who’s said them to me the most. I love these lines, and I think about them with every obstacle I face. Can I change it? If yes, then change it. If no, have peace. Honestly, if I were to write a book about good mental well-being, this would be rule number 1.

I do a lot of background work to anticipate obstacles and have a plan in case they arrive. Weather is something I can not change, but our session time is. Consequently, I always make sure we have a weather backup, and this is especially important because 90% of my clients aren’t from Door County and can’t say “yeah, we’ll try again next week.” Option one is to have a second date/time planned for poor weather, but if that’s not feasible then we have an indoor location tucked in our pocket.

Our initial plan was to have Marcie and Adam’s family session at 7:30 PM so we could watch the sunset over the bay, and our backup time was the following morning. However, on shoot day, both our planned and backup times weren’t looking too promising.

Weather is something I can not change, but our session time is.

Marcie and I texted back and forth to come up with Plan C. Her family was available any time after 3 PM, so we could bump our session to earlier in the day. With that being said, 3 PM is one of the worst shoot times in terms of lighting, so we chose the latest time that’d we’d be comfortable with the weather (4 PM).

A 4 PM summer shoot time isn’t the WORST, but it’s certainly not the best. I looked out the window as I drove north, and all I saw was a bright sun high in the sky and thought “damn, this is going to be tricky.” In conditions like this, all you can do is find shade and backlight; it limits a lot of what we can do, and water shots are definitely out of the question (which was the whole reason why we wanted a sunset session).

So God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change.

I arrived at our first location, Sunset Beach Park, and I love that there’s a small forest area covered in wood chips and shade because it works in every lighting scenario. It’s a real life saver, and we were able to get our mandatory shots right away.

You can go a step further than accepting things you can not change, and that’s to embrace the changes happening around you. After about ten minutes, the storm clouds started rolling in. The thing about photography lighting is that it’s always best in times of transition (transitioning between day and night, and in our case from bright to stormy). With the sun behind the clouds, we emerged from the woods like uncrystallized butterflies and headed towards the waterfront.

I wasn’t expecting Jack, Marcie and Adam’s son, to want to do cartwheels. We embraced the change and got an awesome shot of him flipping around.

I wasn’t expecting Lexi, Marcie and Adam’s youngest daughter, to suggest having her siblings lay in a circle on the grass. We embraced the change and came away with one of my favorite images of the day.

I wasn’t expecting Keith, one of Marcie and Adam’s family friends, to dock his boat at the same time we arrived at Clark Park. We embraced the change and captured fun images I would never have planned for.

We stopped at Malibu Moo’s for the last 5 minutes of our session. I wasn’t expecting the kids to get ice cream all over their faces (and eventually clothes and legs). We embraced the change, and now we’ll remember a fleeting moment of innocence for the rest of our lives.

The second our session concluded, the skies ripped open and drenched the earth below. Weather was something I could not change, but our session time was.