Sometimes you just get really lucky.

Cherry blossoms. My one goal for this shoot was to find some cherry blossoms.

I had planned the shoot for Sunday afternoon. The weather was supposed to cooperate and I'd heard from an instructor at school that the cherry blossoms up at Greenbluff were supposed to be beautiful. So Saturday afternoon after work, I drove up there to check them out and scout a few good locations.

I get up there and... nothing. Every tree at every orchard was bare and there wasn't a single bloom in sight.

Umm... yeah. Why does it seem that every shoot I try to do, something gets in the way of making the visuals in my head a real thing?

I knew that it was probably just too early in the season for things to be blooming, so I settled with the fact that I was going to have to do my shoot on Sunday without the blossoms, and plan another one for a different day.

I met up with Michelle, my model, at Manito Park on Sunday afternoon. 

Richard came along to help out with lighting. After about 30 or so minutes of shooting, we walked up to the rose gardens. I came around the corner and out of nowhere, there they were... CHERRY BLOSSOMS. I couldn't believe it. They were sparse, but they were there! I immediately took advantage of what was there, and did some shooting getting them involved in my photos as much as possible.

Michelle is such a fun, carefree, sweet girl, and so adorable. Her laugh is infectious in the best way possible, and she's such a captivating person to be around. I wanted to shoot photos that reflected her effortlessness and her sunny personality. She made it very easy for me to do just that, and did I mention, she used to model? She makes it so easy to take beautiful photos.

The lesson that I learned from this shoot? Photo shoots almost never go the way you plan them to. Sometimes they are worse, and sometimes they are much better. Either way, you have to take what the weather, the location, and the model throws at you and make the absolute best of it.

Thanks to Michelle for modeling, as well as Chris Thompson and Richard Russell for assisting on the lighting!