While clients wish for a sunny day for their photo shoots, I always hope for partially cloudy.  The thing you get with sun is the striking shadows and the impressive contrasts in color.  You can also end up with overblown highlights, enhanced wrinkles and eye bags.  The way I work to combat these issues is to find places to shoot in the shade, encourage clients to wear something other than white (on a sunny day only), put blondes and white haired folks in the most shaded spot, and backlight everyone as best I can.  When there is no shade I work even harder on posing, which can be a challenge of patience with young, wiggly kiddos.  But, I get it done with the help of awesome parents.  After that, I just shoot.  I have done all I can and at this point the things that happen naturally are going to be the best.

In the shot above, the kids did great.  This shot was towards the end of their portrait session and they were getting tired but we took a few more and I think the resulting images worked out.