The Bennett Family, a family of three, is outdoorsy and loves farms and nature. Mom Jessica grew up on her family’s farm in Missouri and now her daughter, Emma Claire, loves farms as well – although we think it might be all of those animals she loves the most! The Bennetts had only ever taken professional pictures in a big-box studio. Jessica contacted us for special family portraits in a more custom setting. A bonus was our portrait photography studio and outdoor portrait park’s central location in the Northern VA area, near Cascades, VA and Dulles, VA.

Outdoor Portrait Park Session

The Bennetts wanted outdoor, casual portraits just as Emma Claire gets ready to head off to kindergarten!
Dad Rod and the vivacious and beautiful Emma Claire arrived in almost-matching cowboy boots ready for their family photo session! Jessica’s warm smile and nature was always front and center. It was a hoot and so wonderful to photograph them and their obviously close relationship! The little girl with the big round eyes wore a dress with a giant heart in front which struck us as so reflective of this family’s bond.

Their previous family photos of the three had been taken mostly on the family farm in Missouri, so this was definitely a departure from that, and the big-box studios. With a natural and easy-going way about them, the Bennetts were so fun to photograph. No one was particularly camera shy. We tried various settings throughout our scenic outdoor portrait park. It wasn’t difficult to find a spot because this family is so naturally photogenic and pleasant.

Special clothing can add meaning to portraits!

One of our favorite picks, seen above in this post, is the loving parents on either side of their precious daughter – with that giant heart on the dress acting almost as an “equal sign” between the parents and child in the photo’s center! Sometimes patterned clothing in family photos can be distracting or clash with surroundings. In this case, we thought it was so reflective of the family and actually enhanced the portrait’s meaning and symbolism.

If you’d like to step outside of a traditional, big-box portrait photography studio and into our idyllic and scenic outdoor portrait park in the Cascades, VA and Dulles, VA area, contact us today! We will both have a lot of fun doing your portraits.

Family Photographer, Portrait Photography Studio

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter portrait photography studio located in Dulles, VA, Cascades, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.

Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.

Best,

Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!

Professional Photographer

“We are a very busy family always running in different directions! I don’t think we have time to do family portraits!” As a Cascades, VA area portrait photography studio, this is something we hear so often. Time. It’s hard to make time for things outside the everyday schedule of work, school, play or sports. As family photographers, we have heard it all!

To tell you the truth, however, we can say that if something is important enough to you, you’ll make the time for it. Think of other things you make time for: A movie, a theater production, a concert, a professional sports event.

In our experience, what we find is that some people will put off scheduling photos of their cherished family until “some day,” usually when they realize they’re running out of time with their children or there’s a milestone such as a graduation. Now they find a way to make time!

Our lives are made of up hundreds, if not thousands, of precious moments. Those moments fill our lives to create memories we look back on – as long as we can remember them in the future! Portrait photography, however, records some of those moments for you. As humans, it’s impossible to recall every precious thing about our lives. As humans, we have become dependent on, first, oral history and now visual documenting to pass on our stories, traditions, and memories.

Family Portraits

A family portrait is valuable to you because, for the most part, your children will likely live with you as a family for 18 to 22 years. After that, they may move away, complicating the opportunity to schedule portraits together.

Your parents, their grandparents, will hopefully live long lives. A family portrait gathers all those loved ones precious to you, different generations, and captures them in a portrait. We know from our experience how coveted those portraits become later in our lives. No one lives forever, including us.

The photographer in the family is usually the one least captured in photos. Professional family portraits brings the family photographer out from behind the camera and into the photo with their beloved family. Professional portraits are a great opportunity to capture your entire family in a portrait.

It’s important to find the time to do a professional family portrait. Whether your children are still young or teenagers, prioritizing time to do that family portrait of all of you together will be time and money well spent!

If you live in the area of Cascades, VA or anywhere throughout the DMV and are searching for an experienced and talented portrait photography studio, Ever After can work with you to get that family portrait done and finished to perfection. We can discuss scheduling something that works for your family!

Family Photographer, Portrait Photography Studio

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, mother-daughter family photographers located in Cascades, VA/Sterling, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.
 
Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.
 
Best,
 
Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!
 
Professional Photographer

Ever After is able to offer our clients one of the most scenic and tranquil “studios” available for professional pictures: A private portrait park! This outdoor garden space glimmers with natural light, seasonal colors and rustic textures. It is the perfect setting for a relaxing and beautiful family portrait session in Dulles, VA, Northern Virginia.

Do you remember that childhood sense of freedom and rush of open air as you bolted outdoors when finally allowed outside to play? Our beautiful and private portrait park offers our clients that same sense of freedom and fresh air. It is an idyllic place for a portrait.

Ever After’s portrait park sessions take place in the midst of a bucolic and picturesque setting! We own the space and have cultivated it with our clients and their portraits in mind. It is private and only open to our clients.

Wooden Bridge and Pier

Our tree-lined pond with its wooden bridge and pier offer a picture-perfect spot. Many of our clients are drawn to there for its perfect combination of water and woods.

However, that’s not all there is! Our iconic red truck is another favorite, particularly for little boys – well, and fathers, too! Portraits incorporating the truck recall a Norman Rockwell painting.

A long-poled fence is a wonderful setting for the whole family. And our swing is a kid favorite!

If a more glamorous look is what you’re looking for, our elegant sofas placed just right can add a bit of bling and interest to your portrait. The contrast between an elegantly-crafted piece of furniture and the rustic nature of a forest can mean an interesting composition for any portrait! We can set the sofa anywhere you want in our portrait park – by the truck, the bridge or even the pier or pond’s edge!!

The trend in recent years has been toward outdoor portraits, and our private portrait park near Sterling, VA and Dulles, VA offers our clients a magical location for their outdoor professional pictures. We are happy to show you the space and answer any questions you might have about your outdoor portrait set in our magical outdoor park.

Sofa Portraits

Family Photographer, Professional Pictures

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter family photography team located in Dulles, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.

Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.

Best,

Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!

Professional Photographer

As a studio specializing in family photography and located in the Northern Virginia area (near Brambleton, VA), we often find that clients who love their families simply want beautiful family portraits.

Allyson came to us after winning an Ever After gift certificate for a portrait session in a special promotion. She looked through our website and liked our family photography, so her thought was to use the gift certificate for a family portrait set outdoors in our portrait park.

Family of Four Portrait Session

This charming family of four, which included four-year-old and two-year-old little boys Alex and Aidan, wanted portraits in our outdoor portrait park. Allyson shared with us during her client chat that her sweet boys are best friends and that when they are very excited, they rub their hands together. She hoped that our portraits could capture their special brotherly friendship. Of course, we would do our best to capture their friendship! We were so glad she shared that important and personal tidbit to give us some background.

We loved that although Alex is a little shy at first, once he warms up, he loves to laugh and be silly. And his love of superheroes is one we share! Little Aidan is outgoing and more talkative, with a love of cars, trucks, and helicopters. And we all know superheroes and automobiles go together like PB&J!

Allyson also mentioned that she wanted shots that showed her, Nick and the boys interacting candidly as well as more camera-aware, or looking at the camera as shown in their portrait here.

Our family portraits are about the love a family shares and their interactions with each other and as a family. After all, that is what makes portrait photography unique and so rewarding to the photographer as well as the client. We were able to make sure we spent time photographing both boys together in addition to the entire family.

Outdoor Portrait Park

This fun-loving and playful family was so easy to photograph! They enjoyed our very special and very natural portrait photography studio! We’re pretty sure they enjoyed their photo session as well. Our outdoor portrait park is the perfect setting for a family with young children. The children (and usually the parents as well) love being outdoors with our tree-lined pond, rustic wooden bridge, and pier. It’s an idyllic location!

We also learned that Allyson shared something in common with us: our philosophy as photographers! She, too, believes that family art is timeless and reflects great memories for the future. She was excited about their new portraits and hoped to display them in their home’s entry hallway where visitors could see them.

If you’ve looked through other photography websites, landed on ours, and appreciate what you see in our gallery of special family photography portraits, we hope you will connect with us as photographers in the Brambleton, VA area and throughout Northern Virginia for your next family portraits. We love to get to know our clients and we always do a pre-photo session chat with them to know more about them. This helps us set up the best photo session for them like we did with The Renzella Family.

Family Photography

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter family photography team located near Brambleton, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.

Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.

Best,

Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!

Professional Photographer

At six-months old, Roland was too young to understand his mother’s motives for a family photo session. However, love was her motive! Stephanie Johnson wanted family portraits taken so that one day her son could see just how much his parents loved him. It was that love that motivated Stephanie to contact us. And according to Stephanie, it was our website’s fine art photography taken across the Northern Virginia area (including Broadlands, VA and Broad Run Farms, VA) that convinced her to trust us with her family’s portraits.

Autumn Family Portrait Session

A good photograph doesn’t just mirror the subject, it captures the subject. You should be able to look at a good photograph and “see” an emotion. When you look at the Johnson’s portrait, eyes are drawn to little Roland’s relaxed posture in his father Chris’s loving arms, his little baby toes, and his cherub cheeks and smile! You can just imagine what it feels like to hold that baby. The photograph evokes that emotion.
 

 
It turned out that Roland was a bubbly little guy, and the very definition of adorable. He made the perfect model. His mom wanted candid pictures of their family interacting and, with him as the star, it wasn’t difficult to do.
 

Outdoor Portrait Park

 
Candid family portraits are popular! Many of our families request candid (or more casual) pictures. They don’t want formal poses. They want us to capture the spirit of their family’s love as they interact in front of the camera while not looking too “posed.”

In her pre-photo session chat Stephanie was asked what she most wanted captured in their portraits. Her answer? She wanted the pictures to convey how happy they are as a family, “what goofballs we are and just how adorable and beautiful Roland is!”
 

As Broadlands, VA & Broad Run Farms, VA photographers, we enjoy fine art photography as much as we enjoy our meeting new families and taking family portraits. We feel honored to be entrusted with something as precious as a family photo to be displayed and cherished for many years. Thank you!

Family Photographer, Fine Art Photography

Ever After is comprised of Mindy Belcher and her daughter Joriana Belcher Anderson, a family photography team located near Broadlands, VA and Broad Run Farms, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.
 
Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.
 
Best,
 
Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!
 
Professional Photographer

As a family fine art photography studio in the Northern Virginia area, near Broadlands, VA, we often hear from moms who find that they’re not in any of their children’s photos! When Mom is behind the camera, she’s often left out of the pictures!

Mother/Son Portrait Session

Carrington is a beautiful mom raising her son Tyler in the Northern VA area. As with so many moms in our area, she had some portraits of Tyler when he was toddler, but she had not one portrait of her together with her son! Carrington decided to remedy this by choosing us for special family portraits with Tyler.

Although studying to be a nurse takes much of her time, Carrington set aside time for these portraits for several reasons. First of all, she really wanted a portrait with Tyler. He’s a teenager now, and she wanted to have those portraits with him now. Also, with her parents aging, she wanted to gift them with portraits of her and Tyler. This busy, hard-working mom wanted to include their little terrier, Orchid, as well. Such a sweet dog!

Although Carrington describes herself as traditional, she didn’t want a formal indoor setting such as she felt a studio photographer would provide. She wanted their Ever After portraits to be relaxed and taken in a natural setting to reflect a more candid side of herself and her son. When we did our pre-session consult with Carrington, it was clear that she had given a great deal of thought to her parents’ taste as it applied to portraits. She wanted to make certain they loved the portraits, too. We were more than happy to work with her vision to give her what she wanted as well as something her parents would love.
 

Outdoor Portrait Park

 
As a studio photographer, we always encourage our clients to consider where they will hang or display their family portraits. However, if they plan on also giving one of the portraits as a gift, then they should consider it like any other special gift. What would the recipient like? What are their tastes or preferences, and where might they display it – on a wall, in a tabletop frame, in an album? If you want the portrait to be meaningful and thoughtful, then you might want to tailor as least one of the shots during the photo session toward the recipient’s tastes.

We believe fine art photography is a worthy long-term investment and a legacy we leave to our children and grandchildren. So when we receive calls from clients or potential clients across Virginia and in the Broadlands, VA area, we are always happy to discuss our pricing, our products, and any special offers we might have going at the moment.
 

Family Photographer, Fine Art Photography

Ever After Portraits is comprised of Mindy Belcher and Joriana Belcher Anderson, a mother-daughter family portrait photography team located near Broadlands, VA in Northern Virginia. We specialize in timeless and emotive fine art family portraits.
 
Family means everything and capturing those precious moments to preserve forever will mean family heirlooms for you to share for years to come.
 
Best,
 
Mindy & Joriana – Contact Us!
 
Professional Photographer