Family Portraits

Spring is in full swing and that means its time to start thinking about getting those family portraits updated! Whether its out in the Texas Bluebonnets or in the front yard of your house getting everyone together, wearing matching or at least coordinated clothes and trying to get everyone to smile at the exact same time, family photos are everyone’s favorite experience!

Well, not really…

For most participants, the family portrait is a grueling experience. Usually only mom wants to be there. The kids are all hot and tired of being told to stand still and smile and dad often goes from complacent to a silent pipe-bomb of rage just waiting to explode. Add to that unpredictable weather, heat and or humidity, bugs, uncooperative animals, you’ve got a recipe for a photographic disaster!

But - there are a few ways you and your family avoid things becoming such a mess. Here are a few tips and tricks to make your family portrait experience something that is actually enjoyable!

Tips for Great Family Portraits

Choose a Photographer with Lots of Family Photo Experience

I’m a photographer and if someone contacts me and wants family photos, I’m going to take them! But I’m going to be honest - I’m not good at them. Sure, I can get you a great look photo in the end, but it takes a special and experienced photographer to be able to reign everyone in the family in and get them focused and smiling. I’ve worked with photographers in the past that are only family photographers and they almost seem to be able to hypnotize disruptive children, unhappy husbands, and critical mother-in-laws into an almost blissful catatonic trance where they smile and take amazing photos. When shopping for a family photographer, don’t only look at the end results, but take a look at their portfolio and their reviews. A photographer with lots of family photos under their belt and a lot of positive reviews definitely knows that they are doing! And if you’ve got someone that’s good at what they do in charge, it will make the entire process flow much more smoothly and more importantly, much faster!

Choose a Time that Works with Your Kids

This is the most important when your kids are under the age of 6 but it can also be a factor with kids of any age. For younger kids, bringing them when they are freshly rested can make all of the difference. Infants to preschool kids can become particularly difficult and cranky. Even older kids and teenaged children can be difficult and grumpy if they didn’t get much sleep the night before. Well rested kids make the best photographs!

So this means that you are going to have to schedule a time that works best for your kids rather than one that works best for your photographer or yourself. Make sure your younger kids are within an hour of waking up. Make sure you older kids haven’t been up all night at a friends house or playing video games. For everyone’s sake, pick a weekend that isn’t already packed full of things to do.

Choose a Place to Shoot that Makes it Easy

Almost no one is shooting family portraits in the studio any more. I have no idea why? When you opt to shoot outside, you are surrendering practically all control over the quality of your photos. It could be raining, it could be cold, or hot, cloudy or ridiculously sunny. Shooting outside can be extremely difficult. However it does give you the ability to get some more interesting backgrounds and work with larger props or even cars or buildings.

However, shooting in the studio is an amazing option and really really does simplify the process. The photographer can control the lighting, the environment (thank you AC and heat), and can even include customer backdrops and props. when you’re shooting outside, your photographer is battling the elements to get a decent shot while inside they can be in complete control and can produce more exact and beautiful images much faster than they ever could outside. It’s much faster to shoot in the studio also, meaning that you might be able to get everyone out of there before they expire and start screaming or grumping.

You’ve got to balance a lot of factors when it comes to selecting a place to shoot, but I would definitely recommend checking with your photographer to see what in-studio family portrait options they might have available.

Make it More than Just a Photo Shoot

Plan something fun to do afterwards! Ice cream, go to the movies, go out shopping, anything that will give your kids and your husband something to look forward to. This kind of reward motivation can really help people stay focused and gives everyone a reason to work hard to get the photos done and get out of there!

What to Wear to your Family Photo Shoot

A lot of families do themes or wear matching tops. You would be surprised how much drama this can cause. I’ve seen mom’s buy wrong sized shirts for their adult children, which is a disaster. I’ve seen some matching family shirts that are so embarrassingly lame that it almost physical hurt me to snap the shutter. I know many of you are going to approach family photos with this doctrine of ‘everyone much match’ or at least be coordinated, but I would suggest at least considering how resistant some of your family might be to this and how much drama it might cause. Because if its going to be a problem, its going to ruin the photos.

I once had an adult child lose it over being forced to wear a matching shirt for a photo shoot. In the Office part of my studio, this 20-something guy began screaming and dropping ‘f’ bombs at full volume. It made for some very awkward photos a few minutes later. It can be helpful to get input from your family members so that they might be more apt to wear the outfits without complaining. Or you could always just not worry about anyone matching and just let them be yourselves. Whatever you choose, just make sure that its appropriate for the weather. I’ve seen people taking family photos in tropical attire in 30 degree weather and people dressed up like eskimos in the middle of 80 degree weather. Everyone was miserable and its hard to smile when your teeth are chattering or you can’t get the sweat out of your eyes.

Remember to Have Fun

Families are being pulled in so many different directions these days and with so many distractions its hard to actually have any memorable or meaningful moments together as a family. Instead of making family photos a stressful event, why not try to turn it into something fun? The biggest problem with taking family photos is that someone, if not everyone is miserable and it just shouldn’t be that way. Talk with your photographer about ways you can make the shoot fun. Think about some out of the box photo ideas, check out Pinterest and see what neat concepts you can come up with. But don’t let your family photo be a miserable experience!

Texas Bluebonnet Photos 2021

For many of us here in Texas, spring is just about one thing - waiting for the perfect time to go get those family bluebonnet photos! There are so many factors to consider - location, time of day, what to dress the kids in, etc. For us, we don’t actually take a lot of family styled photos of our kids, but bluebonnet photos are the one annual thing we do. And to be honest, I stress about it every year.

Getting the Perfect Bluebonnet Pictures

If you haven’t already, go check out my previous blog post, that gives a lot of tips and trick on how to get great bluebonnet pictures. Click Here to check out that post! There are a lot of great tips there that will help you get really fantastic photos. Here’s what I did this year to try to up my bluebonnet photo game!

My Camera

This year, for the first time in a few years I decided to go back to film for our family bluebonnet photos. Last year during the middle of Covid season, I just snapped them with my digital. The previous year, our kids were really little and so I knew there was no way I was going to get them all to sit still and behave so there would need to be a lot of editing and photoshopping. But this year, I thought I had a chance to get a decent shot of my three younger kids. I loaded up my Hasselblad 501cm with the 80mm lens attached and headed out! The 501cm is an amazing camera, its fully manual but its fast for a fully manual camera. Plus, I just really wanted to use this camera. I mainly keep it in the studio, but I felt a trip to the bluebonnet fields would a fitting exercise for my latest camera acquisition.

My Film

I’ve known for like 4 months what film I was going to use for this shoot. I’m not kidding when I say that we take these photos very seriously each year. I’ve literally been planing these photos since winter started. For this shoot, I decided to go with Kodak Portra 400. I’m using a medium format camera so I used the 120 version of the film but you can also get it in 35mm. Portra is great for skin tones and that’s what I really wanted to focus on this time around. I loaded up two rolls (24 exposures) and hoped I could at least get one decent photo out of 24…. But there was no way to be sure that would even happen.

One trick that I have learned from shooting with Kodak Portra 400 is to shoot it at ISO 200 instead of 400. This means, you are essentially overexposing the image, but the over exposure actually brings out some of the best qualities of Portra and it can be easily corrected in the scan/print process.

Lighting Bluebonnet Photos

We were traveling back from College Station after visiting our oldest at Texas A&M and we were adding this photoshoot on to the end of a very busy weekend. There are several amazing locations in Ennis, TX for bluebonnet photos, which was on our way back to that’s where we planned to stop. If you’re looking for a great location for bluebonnet pictures - Ennis is it for North/Northeast Texas! Unfortunately, the time we were going to be in Ennis was not going to give us the best lighting, so I had to improvise.

I positioned my family in a little patch with their right sides facing the mid-afternoon sun. The shadows were harsh. I metered for the bright sunlit side of their faces and then I pulled out my strobes to fill in the dark shadows on their faces. I metered the shadows first and discovered that they were 4 stops below the light side. Which is harsh for sure. If you are looking for a meter, I use the Sekonic L-478D-U. Its an incident meter but it works great and has been a very handy tool to have in my camera bag for years. I set up my lights to try to compensate for the shadows. I had brought with me my Profoto B2’s (these aren’t made any more sadly - the Profoto A1X is a good replacement) and a Profoto 2’ Octabox to help control the harshness of the flash. The octabox from Profoto has two diffusers inside so it really really softens the shadows a lot and fills very nicely. I positioned the flash about 5 feet from my subjects at a 45 degree angle to fill light from the left side.

Posing for Bluebonnet Pictures

While I had several great picture poses in my head, we had to just go with whatever my kids would do that day. As you can see form the photos below, it was kinda a mess. Make sure you get low and get lots of bluebonnets in the shot and in the background. We were positioned on a hill so being lower also meant I could cut out all of the people that were on the other side of the hill taking photos also.

Processing the Film

While I normally process my own film, I’ve been swamped lately with weddings and events so I sent my photos off to done at Richard Photo Lab. These guys are absolutely amazing! Their prices are reasonable and their customer service and attention to detail is unmatched! I went ahead an ordered prints as well and have been so very pleased with the results!

The hard part about film, especially when you send it off is waiting. Richard Photo Lab is very prompt and it doesn’t take very long to get your images back, but when you’re really excited to see if they turned out, it might was well take forever lol.

With out further delay, here are our Bluebonnet Photos for 2021!

Bluebonnet Pictures

Book Us for Your Bluebonnet Photos!

If you would like photos of yourself or your family in the beautiful Texas bluebonnets, we would be happy to shoot them for you! Our sessions are always flexible, affordable and fun! Click the button below to book your bluebonnet photo session today!