This is my THIRD year of taking Kate and Joe’s family photos and I am so happy about it! I am so lucky we ended up here together and Kate trusts me to capture their family. They seriously showed up to this Sawanoi session ready to have a good time. It was exactly what I needed in my life at exactly the right time.
If you have never traveled to Japan, you don’t know that the weather here is COMPLETELY UNPREDICTABLE. It makes the simple parts of being a photographer so, so, complicated. Almost every session I’ve had here has needed to be rescheduled or ended up 100% overcast. I was so happy to see the sun on Kate and Joe’s session day! But when I arrived at our location thought I had walked into a disaster.
Sawanoi Location
Imagine this. I show up after an hour long drive in traffic to the session location. Both my spot and back up spot are both blocked off with yellow “keep out” tape due to typhoon damage. Commence panicking. I had two families coming to have their photos taken with no place to take their photo. Lucky for me, Kate and Joe arrived totally excited and ready for anything, including to help me in any way I needed. (BECAUSE THEY ARE THE BEST AND I LOVE THEM.)
PS If you don’t know Kate and Joe, this just speaks to who they are. They are the nicest mid-westerners. They are passionate about helping small businesses fuel their potential and create working lifestyles worth living. They even run a Rising Tide Society meeting here called Tuesday’s Together where they facilitate monthly conversations with local small business owners. Anyways, they are just plain GOOD people.
So they arrive, and we collectively decide that the best solution is to step over the yellow tape to access my location. Now in America this is probably no big deal. In Japan however, people are rule followers and we really try to be respectful of common customs and courtesies. But, this was basically a necessity. We had to break the rule. So we walk over and there are a few Japanese gentleman sitting in front of the tape on a picnic blanket enjoying some Sake together. We tell them hello in Japanese and “sumimasen” (excuse me) as we cross over the tape. They laugh and nod and I imagine are thinking, “oh, okay, we got a few badass Americans over here,” then we are on our merry way. We snag a little pocket of light, then continue on the trail.
The most embarrassing moment in my session history
So I take a few images here, then we see this big boulder and decide Kate and Joe definitely need to get on top of the boulder.
They traipse up there, while I shoot a little from the path before deciding the better angle would be down in the sand in front of the boulder. I go ahead and make the move to get in front of the boulder. The spot I was aiming for is right about where Joe’s chest is in the photo above, so clearly I think I am just jumping onto wet sand. Well, I wasn’t.
I was jumping into what we are calling quicksand, because I fell right in and the more I moved the further I fell. Joe was screaming, “NO! THAT’S MUD!” as I jumped but it was too late. We were hysterically laughing and I was literally holding my camera away from the sand in one hand and trying to crawl my way out with the other. Needless to say we had plenty to laugh about the rest of the session as I walked around in my dirty socks and pants wet to my crotch.
The best part was actually my walk of shame. Back over the yellow tape to the gentlemen who laughed at us crossing the keep out tape. The lesson learned is that if the Japanese say keep out and you go anyways, you might fall in quicksand. You will not pop out of said quicksand into a cave full of treasure like Disney tries to teach you. But you also might end up with a funny story and a treasure trove of images of your beautiful friends.
