Brandt: L'Anse Class of 2017

GUYS. I at long last broke the hideous blogging silence of more than 2 months. ALLELUIA!

The first session I'm sharing now that I'm back at it again is one dear and near to my heart: my not-so-little cousin's senior pictures!

Despite having five more years on Brandt, he has continually inspired me for as long as I can remember to be patient, loving, and compassionate to all with whom I cross paths. This boy is pure heart. He is also probably the most random and hilarious human being I've ever met. We grew up only a couple miles from each other and used to spend nearly every day of the summer together with my sister too at our Grandma's house. We binge watched Teen Titans in the morning, ate our super healthy Ramen Noodles for lunch, and would stay in the woods well after dusk building forts. Our imaginations ran wild 24/7 and little limited our ambition to make a bigger, better shack each time we took one apart and reconstructed another. We had a tunnel system through the blackberry and raspberry bushes in our Grandma's gully that could only be accessed by wearing flip flops on our hands and duct-taping our knees, otherwise taking the blunt of the thorns. We would buy pulleys and rope at the hardware stores to create systems to run buckets of water between different levels and to create ways to make the trek up the steepest hill in the forest a little less intense. We'd stack boards on firewood to create ramps for our pedal bikes and learned to ride dirt bikes keeping up with our older cousins in the Baraga Plains, an area that holds much meaning to our family. So naturally, we chose photo locations scattered about the plains for his senior session.

While typically we would've hit the two tracks in a truck, we sped around the dirt roads in my dorky Saturn blaring Crossfade with our windows down for his photos. There was something powerful and cathartic in doing so, being able to rock out to our old favorite songs together again with few cares, at least in those couple hours. The plains smelled fresh of blueberries and jack pine, and the bugs weren't as bad as they could've been. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

And now that the serious stuff is out there, here are a few photos from our even more youthful days together. We were all in our prime, ladies and gentlemen. Some of these were even edited with Picnic if any of you remember that trend ;)