I was so excited to take part in my first Traveling Dress Collective project earlier this year. Eleven photographers from Northern California joined up, chose a beautiful velvet dress from Joyfolie and then created a schedule that allowed each of us 2 weeks with the dress to create some magic.

You can find the official blog post here: The Traveling Dress Collective

It didn’t take long for me to settle on the perfect Mother, Daughter duo to model for this session. I have photographed Holly before, and I know the camera loves her… and sweet little Cora, well she is just too cute, and such a ham!

The rest of the plan I wasn’t so sure about at first. I had been picturing a sweet mother/daughter session on the beach, but that dress wasn’t a beachy dress, and honestly, it was February, and it was cold!!! I decided on the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens instead, knowing without a doubt we would have plenty of beautiful locations to choose from there!
The session played out beautifully, and we had such a great morning wandering the gardens, and laughing at all the curious looks we were getting!

Ok, so, session was a success! But…we now had to keep the session Top Secret until…JULY!!! Yes, JULY!!! It was going to be SO hard not to share any of the images from what ended up being one of my favorite sessions to date! I edited them quickly so I could see the final images, then saved them to an external hard drive and tried to put them out of my head for 5 months. It was seriously a LONG 5 months!

Well, in that 5 months the unthinkable happened… I dropped the hard drive that held these amazing and magical images. I dropped it! It. Was. DEAD! (cue the tears… lots of them… possibly too many even!)

I tried every avenue to recover the images, but in the end, nothing worked. Thankfully, I had saved a handful to the cloud as part of another project I was doing, so I did have images to submit to the blog, but there were so many that I loved and couldn’t wait to share that were now gone. All I have left to share of some of my favorite images are screenshots from my Lightroom previews… so thats what this collage is, a collection of screenshots, BUT at least I can share something!