SOMETHING NEW I'VE BEEN BUILDING

I spent forty-five minutes last week deciding between two shades of green.

Not for a photo. For a logo. A little viewfinder mark with my initials in it, sitting on a swatch of sage that I have now looked at more times than most of the actual photographs I’ve taken this year. This is not the part of starting a photography business anyone warns you about.

Here’s where things actually stand with Photo Sessions with Reuben Ingber, since I’ve been posting pieces of it without ever explaining the whole picture.

The brand, if you want to call it that

Sage green, a little gold accent, a viewfinder mark with my initials in the center — corner brackets like you’re looking through a camera. It’s going on the site, the postcards I’ll mail with prints, the Instagram profile. Small thing, but I wanted it to feel like mine rather than a template, the same reason I run every session through the same editing process I already use on our own family’s photos.

Why, actually

Two things pulled me into this. First, selfishly: I wanted somewhere positive to put creative energy, instead of it just sitting unused between work and everything else. Second, less selfishly: I want more families to have what mine has had.

We’ve done family photo shoots for years now, and those photos are some of the only things in our house I’d actually grab in a fire. But the ones that get me every time aren’t even our own — they’re the two times we gave a session as a gift instead of taking one. My mom’s 70th birthday. My father-in-law’s 60th. Both times, the photos came back and it was immediately obvious: this was one of the best gifts anyone had given them, full stop. And when our son was born, someone gave us a session as a gift, and I still think about that one constantly.

Here’s the thing that actually motivates me, though: before I picked up photography as a hobby, our family was exactly the family I just described — I had somewhere around 800 photos of my kids eating breakfast on my phone, and almost no actual photographs of them. Not “no pictures” — 800 pictures is a lot of pictures — but no photographs, the kind you’d print, the kind that exist because someone intentionally stopped and made one. I want to fix that for as many families as I can — starting with mine, then a few friends this September, then we’ll see.

The practice is just… every day

I’m not treating this as something I’ll get good at once bookings start. I’m out there with Zeke and Judi most days already — a walk, the backyard, a Tuesday afternoon on the living room floor — and I’ve started shooting those moments the way I want to shoot for other families. Same settings, same instinct for when to hang back with a longer lens instead of asking for a pose. If I’m not comfortable enough to catch the real moment with my own kids without thinking about it, I’m not ready to do it for someone else’s.

What’s actually next

Three free test sessions in early September, with real families, before any of this opens up for actual bookings. I’d rather find out what’s broken — the timing, the delivery, the whole experience — with people who’ll give me honest feedback than with someone who paid for it.

If you want to watch the rest of this come together, I’m posting the process at @photosessionswithreuben. The real launch, with the actual site link, is coming this fall.

For now: back to deciding whether that green needs to be five percent darker.