How to Have a Successful Family Portrait Session

This was a family reunion family session taken at a home in Perdido Key, Florida. It consisted of 41 people and several families. It lasted 2 hours and we accomplished everything the family wanted. Here are some tips from the session that helped make this a successful session.

Have a list of must have family combos. This is critical. Your photographer doesn’t know your family. Appoint someone in your family to be the wrangler and have the list preferably printed out and also a digital copy for the photographer just to plan out the session.

Work with the photographer based on the conditions at hand. I would love to order up perfect skies with no wind and mild temperatures. However, perfect conditions rarely happen. For this session we had very clear skies which can be troublesome. However, I had my portable lights to take care of harsh shadows. Because I couldn’t have the families looking into the sun we were limited with the backgrounds.

Work up to the large family portrait. This was a two hour session. We saved the large family portrait until the end when everyone was all together and the light wasn’t as harsh. When everyone had arrived, we started to build up to the big portrait. We started with grandparents with great grand children. After that it was just adding to the portrait until we got everybody.

Realistic Expectations. Because of the amount of people involved, there isn’t much time to give to individual portraits. However, with proper expectations you can get some wonderful portraits. I would setup in one location and we just rotated people in and out.

Have Fun!