Saturday, 12 March 2016

Family Photographs



Through personal contacts I have been asked to photograph many children; I like this work as I enjoy photographing children. These shoots were not done in the studio but were taken in a small studio space I had set up at home with equipment I had loaned from the university store specifically for these shoots.

Because of the limited space and equipment many of these photographs needed backgrounds cleaning and changing before I was happy to present them to the parents. I gave each parent a disc with their child’s image on the front and around 25 images each. One thing I also did was to buy a small 8*10 frame in black and silver which looked sleek and elegant and gave each parent a print out of one of the photos as a thank you, this only cost me £1.75 per parent but it was worthwhile to see their reactions as they had never expected an outcome like that. Hopefully this means they will be thinking of me if they are ever thinking of getting any new photographs done and it also means that if they display the photographs in their house people will be asking about it and I am hoping that my name will be mentioned and some other parents will come my way.

One thing that I will have to mention in future is not to dress children in white as three out four children were wearing white t-shirts, this means that on some screens the t-shirts look blown out and merges into the background however this is not the case.



George was one of the first children I photographed, he was easy to photograph as he was barely able to crawl yet so sat in one place for most of the shoot, his mother sat behind me making him laugh and smile and I managed to get many photographs of him. Below is the image that I printed out and a copy of the disc mock-up.






I also took photos of Marley; Marley is a special needs child who has Down syndrome, there was no difference in photographing him to any of the other children and I really enjoyed the experience. I got many images that I could give to his family, I also took a photograph of Marley with his grandma and this is the image I printed out for them, she was overwhelmed when she saw the print and couldn’t thank me enough, I do not think that they had thought about getting photographs before because Marley is nervous and often misbehaves for strangers yet because he knew me and he knew my mum who was also in the house with me.



He was very hyperactive and did not want to sit still so I had to be quick and work around him; we had often breaks and let him play with some toys. I still managed to get around 80 images, 20 if which I am happy to send to the clients. 



This is another shoot I have done, Ethan is the same age as Marley and was also very hyperactive and was not very cooperative with me, he did not want to sit and smile for the camera so instead I have many photographs of him pulling faces, his mother was happy with these and encouraging them because she knew he would not sit down and sit still, he is also cheeky and hyper full time so these photos reflect his personality.



This is the photograph I have printed out for his parents, she was very happy with this, as she had not expected to receive anything of the sort. After printing I realised that I had not masked around the hair properly and that I needed to redo this and fix it.



I also photographed Ethan’s half-sister Chloe, this was an easy shoot as I was able to direct Chloe to sit still long enough to get some photos, I am pleased with these photographs. I have also printed out one of the photographs of her shown above.



Because they were brother and sister I have photographed them together as well as separate, this was a little harder because Ethan was in a bad mood with his sister and did not seem to want her to be photographed; he kept screaming and shouting that I was not allowed to photograph her. This is one of the outcomes I took of them both together:


They also got a disc of all the photographs and this was the photograph used on the cover. After uploading this image to my blog I noticed the corner in the image and changed this instantly before the client received these photographs.




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