challenging light-fun family!

this family could only meet a 1 pm this past saturday and we'd been trying to schedule a session for a while now. with her husband's job and his travel-it was very challenging. i agreed to do the session at that time as it was a very overcast day so light didn't seem like it would be a problem. as soon as i arrived at the location the sun was out in full force. i walked around the park/lake searching, desperately, for some shade and even-lighting. i walked for 20 minutes and found nothing usable. i encouraged the family to drive to downtown littleton in search of better light. they agreed and suggested another park. the light was not great but usable. they requested several spots around trees but the sun was way too high and too strong. we finally found some shaded spots downtown by some buildings. i learned quite a bit about this shoot.
1. NEVER try to outsmart the sun.
2. NEVER do a shoot with a new camera (I used my brand spankin' new nikon d 700)
3 Repeat #2 OVER AND OVER (I had the camera settings way off! it resulted in lots of stress and even tears while editing the images.)