Tips for Preparing for Family Photos
Tips for Preparing for Family Photos: How to Rock Your Session! Planning and coordinating family photos can seem like a daunting task. Wrangling your family all into one place for an extended period of time and having you all look great may seem impossible but it doesn’t have to be. This should be a fun and relatively stress free process. So to help, I’ve decided to put together a quick guide for you to help the process along and take the pressure off of your shoulders!
Tip #01
First it is imperative to plan out your outfits and coordinate your colors! There is a little bit of thought that has to go into this because you have to think about all of the different factors that will affect the overall aesthetic of your family photos. For example, the location they’re being taken at, the season they are being taken in, the weather, and whether or not the colors compliment each other. You want your outfits to compliment the location you’re in. Keep in mind that you do not want to compete with it all while not washing you out and stealing the show.
You want you and your family and the love you share to be the focus of your photos, not what clothes you are wearing. When choosing the colors and the clothes for your session, you don’t want to match too much otherwise you’ll all blend together. It’s also best to avoid logos and slogans, loud busy patterns, and white — for the most part. At the end of the day these are your family pictures and you can be as formal or informal as you want. But whatever you decide, you also need to make sure you have back up outfits because messes and spills are bound to happen. Often if you have backups, nothing will happen but it always seems to be when you have no backups that you trip and get covered in mud!
Tip #02
A great way to make the pictures unique to your family and fun is to bring props. These props can be serious or funny but they can also be practical too! A great prop to bring to any photoshoot is a blanket. Blankets are great because you can wrap your whole family up or you can lay it on the ground and sit on it all together as well. If you have smaller children, another great prop to bring is their favorite toys or stuffed animals. It helps to keep them happy and engaged and makes for some really cute and memorable moments.
Also, think about if you have anything that is super meaningful to your family as a whole that you can bring or fun signs. Something to avoid when bringing props is make sure you props you do choose aren’t purely seasonal. Winter tends to be a very popular time of year to get pictures taken. But you probably don’t want to have Santa hats in your family photos because in the middle of the summer a picture of all of you wearing Santa hats doesn’t make sense. You want the images to be timeless and good to have hanging up during all times of the year.
Tip #03
Bringing snacks is also a must. There is nothing worse than having a hangry family member that doesn’t want to cooperate, especially when it is a young child and they decide to cry because they’re hungry. Snacks not only keep the whole family happy, including mom and dad, but they’re also a great tool to help get kids to cooperate. You can bribe them with a snack or a piece of candy if they smile for the pictures.
Tip #04
When preparing for family photos you also want to always have your personal grooming in mind. You don’t want to get a haircut the day of the photo session. Oftentimes the haircut doesn’t look perfect right out of the salon and can take a few days to get adjusted to and look good. So if a haircut is a must, doing it further in advance is the best idea. Especially to make sure everyone is their most confident selves on the day of the session!
However, on the day of the session you do want to make sure you have chapstick or lip gloss and some hair styling products such as hair spray. This helps to keep your lips from getting chapped and doing any touch ups on hair, especially if it happens to be windy that day. Speaking of wind, you also want to make sure you style your hair with the location in mind. Something too intricate or fragile that might get destroyed by elements such as wind or water. By keeping the elements in mind, you can avoid having a total hair malfunction and not have to worry about what your hair looks like.
Tip #05
Last, but not least, and possibly the most important, is to bring an adventurous and playful attitude! When you come into the session with a positive and relaxed attitude, your kids take your cues from you so they will be relaxed and have more fun, too.
This is a fun time to document your family as time is ever changing and your kids grow it becomes a great keepsake for you to look back on and enjoy.
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