How to Pick a Mini Session Location.

1)Choose How Many…

First thing is to decide how many sessions you want to hold that day, and how long they will be. I usually do 8 30-minute sessions. 4 in the morning, and break for lunch, and 4 in the afternoon. Once you figure that out you’ll know how early you’ll need to start.

2) Light is Everything!

Pick a location that is going to give you a reasonable amount of good light all day.
This is a hard one! While some locations may look “pretty”, but if they have harsh sunlight, your portraits won’t look as good as you would want them to.
Now realistically no location is going to have gorgeous light all day. But you can find locations that have ok light most of the day, or that has several different spots that have good light at different times of the day. Pick a place that has lots of opportunity for open shade-usually trees and buildings. I use the Sun Surveyor app, to scout out locations. It works with google earth and will show you where the sun is going to be at different times of the day. Even when I know a location really well I still use it cause the sun sets at different places different times of the year.

3) Pick a spot that’s little to no hassle for your clients.

If you’re going to have 8 different clients meet you at a spot and there is literally 5 minutes between each session,  you want them to be able to find the place easy and have parking. Most likely you won’t be able to take calls if someone gets lost (you’ll be shooting) and you don’t want them to have to struggle to find parking or walk a far distance with their littles in their nice shoes 🙂 So I usually try to find a park that has parking and the area I’m going to use is close to the parking.

4) Prepare your clients.

I know this one isn’t technically about the location, so let’s just call it a bonus! I like to send out an email about a week before the mini session. The body of the email is the same for everyone, but I send them out individually with each client’s session start time. Most of the time clients signed up a month ago and they don’t remember exactly what time they signed up for, and since the session are back to back its super important they be on time. The other pieces of information I include are:

• Driving directions
• Map of parking
• Any parking info, like $
• Meet Up Location
• Weather Forecast
• My phone number, letting them know it’s better to text me since I’ll be in sessions all day