Family Portraits: Nightmare or Treasured Memory?

I'm sitting here getting my stuff together for a full day of photographing families, and it occurred to me that most people don't really know how to prepare for family portraits - which makes for tense, worried parents and out of control kids.

Clients worry about what kind of clothes to wear, how to do their hair, etc. But I cannot say this often enough to my clients: relax! How you feel on the inside is often how you look in your portraits. If you are tense and stressed because you are worried about how you'll look, then it will show in the final product. Clothes and hair are only part of the equation.

It is my job as the photographer to worry about eye direction, whether or not Johnny is smiling, and keeping everyone in position. The biggest thing you as a parent can do to make my job easier, and by extension your portraits better, is to make it clear to yourself and your kids that the process will go much more quickly and less painfully if you just trust me and follow directions.

I am not saying that I do not want to hear your ideas, opinions or thoughts on what you want out of your portraits, or that I am infallible, because I am not. I do want to hear your ideas, and make your portrait session everything you hope for. But as a Mom, and a photographer, my experience has been that our kids respond to situations how they are taught, and right, wrong or indifferent, they are taught by us every time we interact with them.

Not to be a whiner here, but we get tired of being the target of blame for bad portraits, when our clients walked through our door in a bad mood because of the fight to get out of the house in one piece!

The best way we as photographers can put you at ease is to make you feel welcomed into our studio. The best way for you as clients to make your portraits treasured memories is to lead by example!

Like Mother Like Sons?

You would think that our twins would get sick of taking pictures, with all of the studio shots I have done of them. They are my advertising boys, on my business card and are the sometimes unfortunate guinea pigs of my experiments whenever I have a new idea.

I realized today while going through the pictures on their little Fisher Price cameras, that not only are they not sick to death of pictures, but they are learning to create images themselves. They pose their action figures, themselves and ME to make their pictures look the way they want.

You're never too young, I guess, to find something you love doing!

Which brings me to my point: our five-year-old twins are arranging items and people to create the images they want, the way they want. Any photography teacher will tell you that a good image is made, not randomly captured. Whether you are taking pictures of your kids playing outside, or arranging a few flowers to look just-so, paying attention to the little things around your subject will pay off in dividends for great shots.

Just a thought for the day...

The Basics...

Photography, as anyone who can do a google search can tell you, literally means to "draw with light". If you understand this, and start to look at your subject with that in mind, you begin to understand why some photographs are stunning, and others are just okay.

There are more advanced concepts like Rembrandt lighting, etc, but the basic idea is to look at your subject for the light, and more importantly, the shadow. A shadow is what gives shape to an image.

Case in point: draw a vase and color it in, but only use one color and the same amount of pressure throughout the drawing. What does it look like? I'd put my money on it looking rather flat.

Now do the same thing, only before you start to draw, in your mind's eye, imagine how it would look if you had the sun shining through a window, falling on the same vase. Can you see the shadows, the way they bend around the shape of the vase?

As a photographer, I do a similar exercise before I set up for a shoot. I think about how the ambient lighting is going to fall on a subject, and then manipulate it in order to give it the definition and shape that I want. Sometimes I use a reflector, others I use studio lights, and other times I use a combination of them.

Depending on the type of shadows I am going for, I may use a harder light, or a softer light. I tend to prefer softer shadows because the overall feel isn't quite as startling, but a sharper shadow edge can really make a spectacular image.

Play with it!