Big Family Photo Session At Point Defiance

Many photographers find large family sessions a bit intimidating. So many things can go wrong, especially when you have a few tiny guys that don't understand the importance of looking your absolute best for the pictures.

These are my cousins. One of my sweet cousins wanted to gift her parents with their whole family photo session for Christmas.

For me the biggest challenge was to find a beautiful location big enough to fit 16 people that wasn't too far from the city.

This family wanted to have the option of forest and the beach, which proved to be a bit difficult because the tide was very high right around the time of the session leaving very little room at the beach.

Finally the day before the shoot I stopped by Owen's beach at Point Defiance Park and thought it would work out really nice.

By the time everyone got here the tide started coming in and I knew I had to act fast if I wanted to get everyone in the pictures. I actually had to get in the water to be able to get this shot. I'm just glad it was August and really hot, so it actually felt really good to cool off.

To insure that everyone was in focus I used a very narrow aperture 4.8 and took multiple shots to make sure I got good pictures of the children. Grown up are always easy, they know to stay still, but little ones are usually not as cooperative. So what I do is take one picture of the whole family and then tell everyone that I will be focusing on each child separately to ensure I get a good picture of each one and then I photoshop the best poses all into one picture. The picture above is an accumulation of three pictures combined into one.

One of the things that I always do with all my clients, even friends and relatives, is I sit down with them and discuss the importance of outfits. My cousins get an A+ on their outfits. I love how instead of them all wearing same colors they chose a combination of a few different colors and it ties the pictures so well together.

Enjoy the rest of the pictures.