Matthew A Kieffer Photography

When you have been married for 20+ years, you might have the tendency to lose sight of a few things. And, after the same number of years of buying birthday presents, you might just start to run out of thoughtful and imaginative gift ideas. Both of those things were happening with me, and due to an offhand comment by a co-​worker, a great resolution was found.
I keep a lot of photos in my office at work, and have done so for so long that I have more or less stopped noticing them. Every now and then an office visitor will comment on a picture, which often causes me to take a fresh look at it. Right around the time of the year when I start wracking my brain to come up with a birthday gift that exhibits a little more thoughtfulness than a Red Lobster gift card (not that there’s anything wrong with that), a co-​worker commented on how much my child had grown since we had taken the family portrait she was looking at. It was then that I realized that we hadn’t had a new family picture taken since the one we were looking at.
Inspiration struck! What a perfect gift! Not only would I find and purchase a gift certificate for a family photo, I would make a personal pledge to not treat the entire process of getting dressed up, going to the studio, getting the pictures taken, and going through the meddlesome process of trying to figure which over-​priced printing package to get like it was an ordeal comparable to the Bataan Death March.
The pledge proved worthless, and perhaps not for the reason you might suspect.
What happened was that I used Google to find a local photographer, and what I realized during the search was that family portraits have changed. I’m sure you can still go to Target and stand stiffly in front of a gray background, looking for all the world like Dad should be holding a pitchfork in the American Gothic style, but these days you can have the photographer come to you and take far more informal (and thus more realistic) pictures in the surroundings of your choice.
This is how I ended up trading emails with Matt Kieffer. I wanted to coordinate the timing of the gift certificate to keep it from showing up on the Visa account site that the Missus peruses every few days to make sure we don’t get blind-​sided by another identity theft — Matt was quite patient and helpful throughout the entire pre-​purchase process.
When it came time for the session, he arrived on time and well prepared to get the job done. He did not seem hurried at all — it was a nice, casual couple of hours of setting up various areas in the house using our normal family communal places. He was very conscious of potential distractions in the background that would show up in the final pictures, and was extremely patient as we corralled the pets from their various hiding places throughout the house and struggled to get them to settle down long enough for a few pictures. With the interior shots done, we all donned coats against the winter chill and headed outside for a few more shots.
My pledge to treat the entire experience as enjoyable rather than burdensome was moot: it WAS enjoyable.
We just received the proofs via a web service he uses to show us the collection of pictures and select those that we would like to have him do further editing on. They are fantastic! The lighting and the colors are great, and some of the preliminary edits he did to remove some clutter on the fireplace mantle are amazing. We are very happy with the results that he achieved.
I highly recommend Matthew for any occasion worth remembering.