The Farm at South Mountain is a great place to get away from Phoenix for a while, even though it is five minutes from downtown.  There’s great food there for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  When I go there, I feel like I am back in my home town, minus some palm trees that are still visible there.  But mostly, it is a little working farm right in the middle of the valley.  I hope it never goes away.  So when a client wants something that doesn’t look like the desert, but doesn’t want to travel, this is a great spot.  Of course, there are fees associated with photographing here, so be prepared.

Thomas is a cute little kid.  I shot his parents wedding a few years back.  Like I’ve said before, it is always an honor to photograph the children of my wedding clients.  Thomas is a very curious and active little guy.  He’s got the walking thing down and he is like the energizer bunny, so we followed him around and sometimes, like in the case of this first photo, had to keep moving him back into position.  We would get a shot or two before he was off investigating something else.  But we got the shots and the light was absolutely perfect when we first arrived.

I liked the color on the scene, but on this particular image, he moved into the light and the oranges from the sun were a bit too orange on his skin, so I elected to change it to black and white and loved what I got from it, so this one became black and white.  We could get the same beautiful black and white from all the other images, but this one needed to stay black and white, whereas the rest of the images in the series could be seen in either very well.

Here is his on the go.

The fruit kept him entertained for a few minutes so we went with it.

What you don’t see is that the fruit was in his hand moments before.

This is a Sun Devil Family.  I get that, because we are as well.  So we made a swap into Sun Devil gear and took a few final photos.  I love this shot.  There are more in the slideshow, but this was my favorite.  If you follow my work, you will note that I don’t find typical posed family portraits to be all that interesting.  And while we take them during the course of a shoot.  There are the images I like to pay attention to.  The mean more to me and to the people who are in them.  The typical posed stuff serves more as a record of what a family looked like at the time of the portrait and that’s about it.

It is always such and honor to photograph the the children of my wedding clients.  Thanks Ashley and Darren for trusting me with yours.  He’s a cute kid.

Child Portrait by Jared Platt, Platt Photography

Slideshow Music by Nancy Falkow, Courtesy of Triple Scoop Music

Location: The Farm at South Mountain, Phoenix, Arizona