A Family Photography Session at Montrose Harbor

I had one of my first summer family photography sessions last week after coming back from maternity leave, and what better place to start the one of my favorite locations: Montrose Harbor and Beach.

What I love about this location is that you get urban and natural settings within a small area, and if you are willing to walk a bit your images can have so much variety that it looks as if you went to different places to make it happen.

For this session, we started at the harbor with the view of Chicago’s skyline over the lake. If you go in the evening you will also find plenty of sailboats that will make it into your photos. The wide concrete lakefront path is great for action images, and because it surrounds the Point Bird Sanctuary, depending on the angle you can also get a bit of greenery in them.

If you continue walking and take the paths that connect the lakefront with the Sanctuary, then you get beautiful, tall prairie grasses and a tree-line over which the sun sets creating the most magical golden light. The skyline view now appears behind prairie fields, giving you another flavor of Chicago.

Walk a little bit more, and the lighthouse appears (not pictured), and eventually you get to the beach. First you find grasses coming from the sand, and another view of buildings over which the sun sets. I like to use this area to take some sitting photos of my families.

Finally, you keep going to reach the lake.

Though the beach might be crowded, I have found a spot that works well to get unobstructed images, and if some people make it into the photos I can easily remove them in post-production, making it look like the beach was deserted.

In a single session you can get so much variety and also use the environment to give playful and interactive prompts to your families.