Family Portrait Photography - On Location

With all of this wonderful spring weather that we are having, now is a great time for shooting outdoor family portraits. This recent session with the O'Loughlin family is a good example of the experience that you can enjoy on a photo-shoot and end the day with beautiful portraits that capture the spirit of the family.

Photographing teenagers can be challenging, but it is always great fun. Often young people have very set ideas about how they look and any photographer has to earn their trust. Just like with parents and younger kids, the best way of doing that is to produce beautiful photographs and to show them just how good they look. Here it is obvious that Amy and a camera are made for each other.

Attitude is so important and Ian has the type of laid-back coolness that I wish I had had when I was his age!

I usually try to photograph indoors as well and always try to produce some images in my own portrait style. In this photo of Amy, it was a simple and quick set up using the beautiful natural light coming into the family kitchen.

For this portrait of Ian, we used a shaded doorway to contrast nicely with his skin tone and his Chelsea shirt. (It may have been a red door!)

There are always plenty of breaks between shots, though you never know when a strong image will present itself. Over a two hour shoot, I aim to produce between 50 and 100 images from which a family can choose their favourites for framed prints, folder prints and albums.

It is very important not to forget parents portraits during a family shoot. This portrait of Grainne and Noel was enhanced by the comments coming from Amy and Ian who were behind me as I was shooting.

As this whole family are big music fans, I thought that it might be nice to end with a family portrait in the style that a band might adopt for an album cover! It was a wonderful afternoon and everyone seemed to really enjoy themselves. The family were very happy with their photographs and I'll post some samples of the framed portraits and album from this session at a future date.

If you like these images, then you can find more examples of family portraits at www.noelhillis.ie.

By the way, all of the images were photographed using natural light except for the first one which was lit using off camera flash.