Photos make the best gifts

Professional photos make fantastic gifts, especially for doting grandparents! My clients - two sisters - booked a mini session to get an image of their three children together for a canvas for their parents for Christmas.

The children were aged five years, three years, and 5 months. The older two were clearly very excited which made for fantastic photography as they were happy to beam away in front of the camera. The little one was far more interested in what her brother and cousin were doing!

I think key to getting photos of more than one child, particularly when there is a very young one amongst them, is to just let them do their own thing. Let them play. While a perfectly executed shot with them all looking straight at the camera is ideal, sometimes it’s the ones where they are more absorbed in what they’re doing and each other that produce the most natural, genuine images.

We took a number of the three of them together, then just the older two and then individually so the sisters had a choice when it came to deciding what products they wanted for the gift for their parents.

We shot in home and rather than go for studio style, we chose natural lifestyle photography - the light in one of the bedrooms was fantastic so it meant no flash and no complex lighting corrections in the edit.

It was a really fun session and the children were clearly very close and loved being together, which meant the smiles just kept on coming. You can’t ask for much more than that!