A Family Afternoon at Treasure Island, Laguna Beach

I loved this session for a really simple reason: they got to just be together.

We met at Treasure Island in Laguna Beach and spent the afternoon exploring instead of trying to make every moment into a photograph. The kids wandered through the tide pools, everyone took in the ocean, Mom and Dad held hands and watched their children, and at one point we surprised the kids with a bunch of beach balls to toss around.

That part was definitely less peaceful.  BUT SO much fun.

Those ended up being some of my favorite moments from the whole afternoon because there wasn’t much to do besides let the kids play and see what happened.

Family photos that leave room for real life

Treasure Island is such a beautiful place for family photos because there is so much to experience within a relatively small area—the rocks and tide pools, open beach, cliffs, waves and those huge stretches of sky.

But I think what I loved most in these photographs wasn’t actually the location.

It was watching this family interact with each other.

There were the big, playful moments with the beach balls, but there were also really quiet ones: holding hands while walking along the water, watching the kids explore, standing together for a moment while the waves rolled in.

As a photographer, those are usually the moments I’m looking for.

I want the beautiful portrait of everyone together, of course. But I also want the photograph where you recognize your child exactly as they were at that age.

And this time, we got to hear it too

We also had one of our family filmmakers with us for this session.

I love seeing photographs and film together because they preserve completely different things.

The photographs let me stop a moment and really look at it.

The film gives us everything that happened around that photograph: the movement, the laughter, the kids running across the sand, the waves coming in, the birds overhead and all those little glances that happen too quickly to photograph.

There are even stretches of the film that are simply the ocean and the environment around them, which I love. That’s part of the memory too.

Years from now, I don’t think they’ll only remember that they had family photos taken at Treasure Island.

I think they’ll remember their kids being little enough to get excited about beach balls.

They’ll remember exploring the tide pools together.

They’ll see the way they held hands.

And they’ll get to hear the ocean that was behind them while it was all happening.

That’s the part I love.

Thinking about preserving your own family this way?

Explore our Family Photography + Film experience to see more about how we create relaxed family sessions centered around connection, play and being together.

Location: Treasure Island, Laguna Beach, California
Photography + Film: D. PARK STUDIOS
Serving: Orange County, Southern California + destinations