April 2019 | Shoptini

How do you remember places you have been to or experiences you have had? Most likely, just like me, you take tons of picture and may pick up a souvenir or two as a memento. This is the story of our New Zealand Family Photos!

Heading out on sabbatical to New Zealand and Australia, I knew we would be visiting some amazing places. And definitely some worth documenting with epic photos!!! As you all know, pictures are kind of my thing… especially family photos. Sure we would have lots of selfies, photos of Kade and I or Kade and Spencer. But wall hanger family photos that I so desired would be much harder for us to capture.

New Zealand SOUVENIR

With all of this in mind, I decided that the only souvenir I wanted was New Zealand family photos. So I started planning accordingly. First, I reached out to a few local Queenstown area photographers. Then I worked on creating our New Zealand family photo style. Inspired by the badass mountains and the serene waters of New Zealand, we went boho chic. Think dreamy and whimsical meets badass.

OUR FAMILY STYLE

Remembering how much I loved the custom leather jacket from our Day of the Dead photo shoot, I decided to style leather jackets into one of our looks. I found the perfect little leather jacket from H&M for Kade and a convertible leather jacket/vest combo from Members Only for me. My friend Kim, of Kimberly George Art, hand painted custom designs to add a little extra special touch to our style.

If you follow me on Instagram you might remember I asked you to vote on a few options related to dreaming, adventure and taking a journey. That was all to decide what we would use for the back of our leather jackets. After a few days of deliberation, I went with Dreamer and Little Dreamer. And playing off Kade’s nickname, ‘Moose’, Kim was able to incorporate a Moose head for him and flowers for me. She freaking nailed these jackets!

To complete our look Kade wore black vans, a plain white tee, and Mayoral jeans from Wee Chic Boutique. I wore a simple mint tulle dress from Asos, Lilly Pulitzer sandals and Silk and Stone Designs jewelry. Spencer wore a simple black tee, jeans and sneakers. He was smart to wear sneakers, the morning dew didn’t fair well on my sandals. Thankfully I had another pair of flip flops in the car for our other shots.

OUR PHOTOGRAPHER

We teamed up with Ray Tiddy for our New Zealand family photos. Ray is located in the Lake Wanaka area. For our New Zealand family photos, our wish was to have a variety of mountains and water as our backdrop and we thought Lake Wanaka (45 minutes outside of Queenstown) would be perfect! We had visited Lake Wanaka a few days prior and loved it! There was actually a particular spot I had in mind but the three hour hike in, or helicopter option, deterred us from that location. But when we return in a few years we are 100% going there. To capture the variety of landscapes we desired, Ray took us north west around Lake Hawea, to a few hidden gems along the road side and around the blue pools area.

Ray was amazing! He really took my concept board and delivered exactly what we were looking to capture. He was really great with Kade too! Capturing Kade being Kade in all his cuteness! I have so much more to share with you about our New Zealand adventure in upcoming blog posts but I just couldn’t wait to share some of my New Zealand souvenir with you now!

I hope you enjoy these photos as much as we do! And if New Zealand wasn’t already on your bucket list, maybe it is now!