Children’s Portraits

Here’s something I’ve noticed over forty years of portrait sessions that most parents never see coming. It isn’t the difficult child that derails a session. It isn’t the lighting or the timing or even a bad morning. Nine times out of ten, the sessions that don’t fully deliver on what was possible trace back to…

Let me tell you what a two-year-old actually is. A two-year-old is a person who has been on earth for twenty-four months, who is still figuring out what their body can do, who has approximately zero capacity for abstract future rewards, and who is experiencing almost everything for the first time. They are not a…

There’s a portrait I made about fifteen years ago of two brothers — eight and four at the time — that I still think about. Families from Eden Prairie and Edina bring their kids to our studio for exactly this kind of session. We’d finished the formal part of the session and I was adjusting…

Nobody tells you how fast it goes. Families from Minnetonka and Wayzata trust Dale Studios to help them stay on top of these important milestones. People say it — “Enjoy every moment, it goes so fast” — but saying it and knowing it are entirely different things. Most parents don’t actually know it until they’re…

There’s a moment that happens to almost every parent I’ve ever met. Families from Plymouth and Chaska count on Dale Studios to capture these milestones before they slip by. It arrives on an ordinary Tuesday — while you’re watching your child do something completely unremarkable, tying a shoe or eating cereal or laughing at something…

The parents who come to us with the most emotion in their voice are almost never parents of newborns. They’re parents of eleven- and twelve-year-olds. At Dale Studios, families from Eden Prairie and Chanhassen tell us the same thing — they wish they had come in sooner. They bring a phone, and they scroll, and…