I wanted to post a brief entry to talk about my family’s portraits last weekend. I feel like I went through the gamet – planning, styling and then implementing our family portrait session. Albeit it only involved my parents, my brother and his family and my husband and I, it was still some work. I’m hoping that this helps some of my amazing clients (and future clients) in planning a successful family session!
We were on a real time crunch for our photos (more on that later) so we didn’t have a lot of time to get a photographer so I opted to purchase a remote shutter and enroll the help of a friend to help get the little one’s attention to the camera and click the shutter a few times for me too! Here is the process I went through:
1. Choose location. For me, I wanted to use my family’s property in Milton, Ky. and knew I wanted to use the old barn and also have a nature background.
2. Choose your color scheme. Knowing I was using the gray barn and the nature scene, I wanted something that could complement either. I told the family to pick either white, dark gray or navy blue. I also allowed one person in each “family group” to wear a plaid. This would maximize us at three plaid patterns that I knew I could evenly disperse throughout the poses. (We all went with gray or white) We decided that it didn’t matter for sleeve length and ended up having a good mix of long, short and no sleeves. I also told the family jeans (didn’t matter the wash) and any shoe or sandal (avoiding sneakers if you could).
3. Choose your time. I knew the lighting is MONEY first thing in the morning at my mom’s house but that it didn’t work with anyone’s schedule (and we DEF didn’t need to deal with the craziness of one another that early!) We went with evening so we could get some golden hour love and I knew that the temps would cool off (it was kinda warm!).
So then it was up to me (the photog) to do our posing and workflow (so leave that to your photog too!). I knew I wanted some smiling poses and then wanted some of us just hanging out – so I handed over my remote to my 3-year-old nephew for a part of the session too.
Here’s how a few of our family photos turned out. I’m loving them – and my crazy family! (And through this, I realized that my hair is getting REALLY long.)
Enjoy!
