Extended Family Sessions: Beauty in the Chaos

I receive tons of inquiries for multi generational family sessions. I photograph many of these large group sessions. They are really special sessions for the families and, often times, are gifted to grandparents for special occasions. This is a special gift that the entire family can appreciate.

As you can imagine, working with large groups like this involves a large degree of planning, flexibility and an open mind. It also requires lots of additional time, both during the session and in particular when it comes to editing these sessions, especially when the session involves multiple children of young ages.

Regardless of the extra work involved, I absolutely love these sessions and truly always have fun shooting them. They do move by really fast and require me to be on my toes and alert for the duration of the session. They also require me to be able to pivot and shoot images as events and moments unfold. I have to follow the lead of the young children and give them breaks as needed and capture those photos of them when they are happy and ready to go.

I always tell my clients, it will feel quite chaotic during the session…this is because there are so many people participating at once. However, it only feels that way because I am working and shooting every single second of that session and waiting for the moments to unfold to tell your family’s story. Does this mean that every single toddler and child is happy throughout the whole session? Absolutely not. We all know that life with children is quite unpredictable and moods can shift at the blink of an eye. Your child may cry during the session or have a tantrum…it is all ok because your child will also laugh, cuddle and go through a multitude of other emotions during the session and I can capture it all.

Families with toddler aged children do need to keep an open mind. I realistically can not guarantee a specific pose or image when photographing children, but I can guarantee that I will capture your love, which is all that matters. So, if you want a gallery filled with images of your family standing static, rigid, posed and looking straight at the camera for the whole session, I am not the right photographer for you. This doesn’t mean I will not capture a few traditional images for you, but that is not what I am ultimately aiming to capture for you.

This recent group was a delight to meet and work with. They are absolutely gorgeous and so very sweet. My client wore one of my favorite free people dresses from my client closet, which looked stunning on her. The rest of the family looked great in a palette of green, white and denim. It was perfect for a June beach family session at sunset.

There were three children under the age of two and we started at 7 pm, so I knew we had to work as fast as possible with the kiddos. It isn’t always possible to shoot every image that involves the kids at the start of the session, so we did have to give them a few breaks, which is always fine by me. The babies were troopers and made it through the full hour long session and there are lots of sweet moments in this gallery.

Here are a few of my favorites from their session. If you are interested in a session, contact me.