Unposed: Why I Love the Imperfect Shot
There's a frame from a family session last fall that I think about a lot. Mom is fixing her baby's outfit, half-turned away from me, laughing at something dad said off to the side. Nobody is looking at the camera. The horizon is slightly crooked. Her hand is a blur.
It's the photo they printed largest.
The shot we were "supposed" to get
Every session has the shot list version: everyone facing the camera, chins tilted, smiles held. And I get those: they matter, grandparents love them, they belong on the mantel.
But if you look at the photos people actually return to, the ones that end up as phone backgrounds and get pulled out years later, they're almost never the posed ones. They're the moment right before or right after. The laugh that broke the pose. The kid who refused to sit still. The look between two people who forgot I was there.
Perfect is easy to admire and hard to feel. Imperfect is the other way around.
Why imperfection holds feeling
A blurred hand means someone was moving. A crooked frame means I was moving too, following something real instead of arranging it. A squinting laugh means the joke actually landed. These "flaws" are evidence. They prove the moment happened instead of being manufactured.
That's why an overly retouched, perfectly posed image can feel strangely empty. Everything wrong has been removed, and somehow the life went with it. Memory doesn't work in sharp, symmetrical frames. It works in fragments — soft, warm, a little off-center. The photos that feel like memories are the ones built the same way.
How this shapes the way I shoot
If you've read my earlier posts, you know I shoot digital with a film-inspired eye — grain, softness, color that feels remembered rather than recorded. The unposed moment is the other half of that same idea. Film taught photographers to wait and to commit; you couldn't fire off two hundred frames and fix it later. I try to shoot that way even with a full memory card: watch more, direct less, let the moment finish happening before I decide it wasn't the "right" one.
In practice, a session with me is less "stand here, look here" and more giving you something to do: walk, tell each other something, hold the baby the way you actually hold the baby. My favorite frames happen in the gaps, and I keep shooting through the gaps on purpose.
What this means for you
If you're nervous that you're "not photogenic," you're exactly who this approach is for. You don't have to perform. You don't have to hold a smile until it stops being one. The photo I'm after already exists in how you laugh at your person, how your child climbs you like furniture, how your hands rest on a belly that won't be there in a month.
My job isn't to make you look perfect. It's to make sure that when you see the photo, you feel the day again.
The imperfect shot isn't the one that got away. It's the one that got kept. Take imperfect and real shots with me for this fall and holiday season by booking here.