Family Portrait

Last weekend I had the pleasure of doing a family portrait session for one of my close friends.  This was one of the first family portrait sessions I have done and I’m glad I did it. The little girl was cute and was definitely a little ham at times and very fun to work with.  While the little boy, once we got past the silly faces and not listening I got some nice photos. I will say one thing, he did try his mother’s and my patience I was able to capture some nice images.  The mother and children shots turned out pretty good, but I was disappointed in my capture of the father and children shots. However I was able to capture one very cute father daughter picture.  We did the whole family last, which I think was a mistake on my part since I could tell the kids were tired at that point.  I did my best to make it work.

I learned many lessons from this session. The main one being you have to do the group shots first, and then do the individuals. Also I needed to keep the session less than two hours when working with young kids because they get tired and fidgety.  And the key thing about family sessions is lots and lots of patience. 

I shot the session with a portable studio set with two stand lights and an off camera flash.  I used a 18 -55mm lens with an aperture of f8, variable shutter speeds and a 200 ISO while shooting in RAW. I ended up taking around 300 shots but culling it down to 86 shots. Many of the shots I deleted were of very silly faces, blinking and overall bad composition.  I think what I have is good, and am happy about the number of finals.  I did post process them through LightRoom.