Family Portraits at Lake Louisa State Park

When you move 1000 miles away to a brand new city, everything can seem a bit intimidating. Multiply that by 5x when you have to make new friends and build your business clientele and vendor connections from scratch. Thank God for my extrovert personality when it comes to making friends, otherwise, I wouldn’t be posting these family portraits at Lake Louisa State Park in Clermont, Florida.

It started with my googling other wedding photographers in my area out of curiosity. For any creative, it’s always great to make friends in the industry to recommend clients to when you don’t have availability or have an emergency. It’s also just great to have friends in the industry that you can talk to that understand your business struggles and triumphs that aren’t your spouse. LOL The downside to making new friends in the industry is that you never know who is truly going to be welcoming, or who will view you as competition.

Anyways! So I stumbled across The Hendricks website and loved their work, their values, and who they were as people. I then came up with the courage to send an email introducing myself and sharing a bit of my story about how we just moved to Florida. I also mentioned how if they were interested, I would love to do a family session photo swap. Pretty much, I would photograph their family and they would photograph mine. To my surprise, Stephanie replied back excited and happy to get the ball rolling. She had mentioned she had been wanting to get updated photos anyways so it worked out perfectly!

We decided to meet at Lake Louisa State Park in Clermont, Florida for our session and it was the perfect location! The entire time we had so much fun with Stephanie, Landon, and their two girls. All our girls were similar in age, so they instantly became friends! The only negative part of our session was the mosquitos! OH, MY WORD! We all had probably 10 mosquito bites in the first 10 minutes. Luckily, I had some mosquito spray in my camera bag so we all got heavily sprayed before continuing. LOL

After we finished all our photos, we asked them if they knew of any good Mexican restaurants around the area. Their faces lit up and said they were heading to one for dinner! Long story short, we all went to dinner together at San Jose’s Original Mexican restaurant and ate to our heart’s content! The adults were at one end and the girls at the other. We all got along so well and it was so nice to have an adult conversation with like-minded people. Haha! The girls all played together too and were laughing and giggling so much. Then as if we hadn’t already spent enough time with them, we then went out for ice cream together at Twistee Treat! When it was finally time to say goodbye, my girls were begging to go spend the night at their house. Haha!

Since then we have already had a 3-hour-long Chik-Fil-A playdate. Haha! It also helps that both of our families homeschool our girls, so we had the flexibility to make plans. Stephanie and I loved chatting while the girls played and it was just so nice!

Now, look at all the gorgeous photos from the Hendricks family portraits at Lake Louisa State Park! Aren’t they the most adorable family!?