Shannon is a talented wedding and portrait photographer, who just happened to take mommy and me photos and my kids and me a couple weeks ago. I was so excited to swap session with her and get her adorable kiddos in front of my lens.

Let me tell you how I dropped the ball, in a major way, when we were about to start shooting. As Julia Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman would say, “You made a big mistake. HUGE!”

You see, I had Shannon and her kids meet me at a nature habitat in north Tempe but as we began walking into the preserve, we realized that homeless people were camped out among the trees, which, in itself, is not an issue at all.

We were ready to start shooting, nonetheless. So I throw on my camera, turn it on, go to check my settings, and my LCD screen reads something no photographer ever wants to see at the start of a session. No memory card. “Oooooooooh noooooooo!” I’m saying to myself. I start frantically looking in my bag for my backup card. I found one, but it only had 128 MB of memory. When shooting RAW, that gave me exactly two frames to shoot before the card would be full. Grrreeeeeat.

My heart stops. Luckily, we had at least an hour of light before the sun would set, so we pack up into our cars, I run into CVS to buy a new SD card (and some cold water and fruit bars for Shannon’s kids), and we headed to nearby Papago Park. Thank goodness that I had done some scouting earlier that day and knew exactly where to go. This spot did not disappoint and I’m so excited to shoot my Mommy + Me Mini Sessions here this weekend.

Thank you, Shannon, for giving me grace when I needed it the most. In my years of photography, this has never happened before and, I pray, it’ll never happen again. I had so much fun with your sweet kiddos!! xoxo, brenna