FAMILY PORTRAITS
Great family portraits are a happiness portal
built on skillful capturing of
feelings, stories, and attentive details.
Great portraits capture
how a moment felt
Our ability to recall specific positive emotions is essential to our emotional resilience.
A great family portrait captures how a moment felt, not just what the portrayed looked like at that moment in time. This is what allows us to re-experience a specific happy memory.
The right kind of family photographs makes permanent our fleeting happy moments—something to draw on in difficult times.
Displayed mindfully in our homes, they are a post-it-note, a call to recall the good, like the tiny hands of our toddler holding ours, offering a calming recall when navigating her teenage years. Powerful family portraits preserve feelings; carefree youth, tenderness, togetherness, delight, and intimacy.
In choosing a family photographer, evaluate their work based on the emotional response towards an image.
_edited.jpg)
Tell stories
The stories we tell shape who we are. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments’ wrote Ted Chiang, esteemed science fiction author.
Great family portraits should tell the story we ‘want’ to tell our family of who we are. I find a considered choice of environment to be essential in capturing stories. In discussing the session, I explore significant locations to the family, such as a favourite beach, the family home or other places of meaning to the people whose story is being told.
In creating your family portraits with your photographer, assess their curiosity about who you are and their flexibility with locations.
_edited.jpg)
Are attentive to details
The quality of attention we pay someone is a good measure of our love. By capturing unique attributes of a loved one, not only we tell them of who they were, but we show our deep love for them by having paid close attention, to know and understand them beyond the surface.
Look for family photographers who pay attention to the details and review their work for a mix of perspectives.
As a portrait photographer, my job is to make permanent a moment’s shades of sweetness in the ordinary and everyday.
My portraits capture how a moment felt in a way that tells family stories as they would like them told in visually stunning art form; a fine art post-it-note to remember those splashes of happiness.
