LTTL: ¡Viva Familia!

It began when Entrepreneur decided in January that this wall portrait was a bit out of date. Circa 2002, I must admit it is a bit dated! The pupper is Sundance, our first Golden Retriever who passed away in 2005. And, in 10 years, our family has grown and changed a bit. So it was probably time.

And what better opportunity than to have one done in surroundings we all love…..the beach. And, well what do you know….we were scheduled to be at the beach in just about a month, which meant the task to find a Cancun photographer was front and center.

I went to some trusted sources….Google and Trip Advisor. After narrowing down the possibilities to three, I sent inquiries and the race was on. I settled on Cancun Studios and the arduous task of long-distance coordination began. Coordinating 2,600+ miles apart is something new to me, so once the details were confirmed, all I could do was cross my fingers and hope I made a good decision. The Golfer and The Investigator were in charge of color selection and outfit coordination. Coral and Aqua…nothing says beach-y quite like those colors. It turned out to be a great choice.

The first hurdle came when I was trying to make a local call from the resort’s front desk to notify the photographer we were in town. The Park Royal resort informed me we couldn’t bring in an outside photographer on their grounds. Coincidentally, they had their own photographer at which time I told them I didn’t know that and had already paid the studio. Plus, we were going to shoot at the FEDERALLY-OWNED beach. All we needed to do was walk through. We’ll consider it. Come back tomorrow and we’ll have a decision for you. Yeah, right.

Tomorrow came and when the photographer showed up at the resort for our session, management stayed true to their original decision….no access. We were livid, but the photographers were calm, cool and collected. Instead, they drove us to a public beach (their “studio”) and shot for more than an hour! Easy, conversational…and patient…they worked with us…and tiring one-year-old Twix…to capture some wonderful memories. I have to say, we’re thrilled with the photos; and the photographers were wonderful people, both professionally and personally. We learned a lot about them, their family, their backgrounds, how they met, their children and how they moved from southern California to Cancun ten years ago.

Here’s a mini gallery of some of the photos taken. This is by no means all the ones we like…but I’m sure you don’t have time to go through 200 more!

Twix was fascinated by the sand and we had a hard time getting her to look at anything else!

Photobombed!!

I’m happy we went ahead and spent the money for these photos so, whatever happens in the future, we’ll always remember this time spent together as a family. One thing if for sure, we have a very hard decision ahead of us on what will replace that dated portrait on the wall. My guess is there will be more than one photo up there when all is said and done! ¡Viva Familia!

Linking up with LTTL

Even though these photos are not ones I took, they do reflect Life Through the Lens of a special time in our lives. Sooooo, I’m hoping Lisa at Simply Living Photography will grant me a little leeway this week.