Family Matters

So on Friday I did a photo shoot of the largest family I have worked with to date.

Always a challenge to work with more then a few people and when you add in all the children and a 10 month old baby - wow! Almost 100 shots to get a handful where the MAJORITY (never all) of them are looking at the camera. However "perfection" is not all that is important. to me some of my favorite photos don't have every single person looking directly at the camera with perfect smiles pasted on their face. A Family is never perfect - it is full of all sorts of different personalities and my goal is to try and let those individual personalities shine through wherever possible.

I really enjoyed working with this family, but as
always my biggest joy is working with the children. The three girls in red live in my neighborhood and the girls in white are their cousins. The girls know me by sight as I walk by their house with Asher a few times a week, but until the day of the shoot they really had no connection to me. As always with kids - they start off a little shy, a little unsure, and sometimes more then a little annoyed at having to "sit still" and smile for a stranger. When working on family portraits , it is always a challenge to get them to settle in, which is perfectly natural, and also why I love to let them run and play and try to capture them in action. It doesn't take to long before they are having FUN with the whole process and of course those are the moments where the best photos come through.




One of the lovely girls even became my "art director" when it was her idea for them to pose for this next photo.














Some people may not be happy that all 5 girls are not looking at the camera and smiling in perfect unison. But as I said - that isn't family, that isn't life. Instead the natural beauty of all of their individual personalities shines through in this, and I believe that is what makes a photo special.

To me it is important to let the kids feel involved and when they come up with ideas or poses I always go for it, because the more fun they are having the bigger the smiles. The bigger the smiles the more genuine and beautiful the photos turn out. Natural life, my favorite way to capture such beautiful children.