Fall Family Mini Shoot: Planning and Behind The Scenes
Are we the only family who kind of hates the process of having family photos taken? We love the results, but jeez! It can be painful! Trying to find the right clothes for 5 people that coordinate but don’t match, getting everyone to look at the camera at the same time, nap schedules and moods aligning, staying clean for long enough to get a few shots, it’s stressful!
But we love the results, so we endure.
We haven’t had family photos taken since last November and way back then Clara was just a teeny tiny baby. We were overdue. We had a spring Bluebonnet session planned while we were still in Texas but the lockdowns came at just the right time to cancel our session and miss the blooms. We didn’t know any photographers in Colorado Springs (most because we don’t know ANYONE) so we got on our friendly neighborhood Facebook page and saw recommendations for photographers with really phenomenal portfolios, but I’ll confess I experienced some sticker shock. We were NOT in the habit of paying $500-1200 for a family session, and it was just not in our budget for the fall. It was much more affordable in San Antonio, so we weren’t prepared! But thankfully we had the option of booking a mini session.
Are you guys familiar with mini-sessions? I think they’re a great fit for young families. Especially if your young family contains rambunctious boys. Full sessions can get VERY long if you are trying to contain or direct the energy of wee little devils. Minis are usually (from my experience) structured to last 10-30 minutes and you get a smaller number of shots to choose from and a smaller number of photos to select. I don’t mind this, because if there are more than a couple photos I just HAVE to have, almost every photog we’ve done a mini with will offer the option to purchase additional images. Also I usually only frame 1 shot from any session for our gallery walls. The biggest advantage (aside from a time commitment scaled to a toddler’s attention span) is that it is a more budget friendly way to get time with a great photographer. Instead of many hundreds of dollars, we paid around $150 for our mini session today at Bear Creek Park.
When we have the gallery and select our photos in the next couple of weeks we will share the results, but the process was refreshingly less awful! In the meantime here are a few phone pics we snapped along the way.
The first step for me after selecting a photographer is to plan our outfits. I’ll be honest, a lot of times it can feel easier to just buy new (or a least a lot of new), but for this session I challenged myself to shop our closets to pull together a coordinated look. When styling my family for shoots, I either tend to use a color palate as a jumping off point to look for items or I’ll let one piece of clothing anchor the shot (usually it’s mine or a baby’s as we seem to be the hardest to dress). Then I like to have some variety and some repetition across our outfits, but not too much! I’ve dressed the boys in matching outfits before for family photos and it was cute, but I’ve found that I prefer coordinated to matching in our professional photography. I can save matching for pajamas!
This time, I started with a button-down shirt of Charlie’s. He sized up with his birthday this summer and because of COVID we haven’t been needing fancy outfits so he only has only a couple of button-ups that fit (side note: I don’t know how this is possible, because we handed-down Magnus’s… I suspect a big box of 3T clothes is mislabeled in our storage room or fell off a truck). I literally had three shirts to choose from, and since two had short sleeves, I was going to try to build a palate that included Charlie’s classic blue buffalo plaid shirt. Options were similarly slim for Magnus in the button-down section of the wardrobe but he did have a nice blush shirt that still barely fit, so we had two colors to start with, blue and blush. I wanted to pull in something a little more fall that we also had a lot of in the wardrobes so we added burgundy
Despite the fact that Aaron wears a uniform 5 days a week, he has no shortage of button-downs and I anticipated lots of options for him so I went to my closet next.
Having spent all but maybe ~8 months of the last 6 years pregnant or breastfeeding causing a lot of fluctuations in the size and shape of my body, and the last 7 months, my wardrobe is a challenge. I have a lot of clothes that don’t fit quite like I’d like them to, they are too big or too small or fit but no longer flatter. It’s always a little bit of a gamble, is something I pull off a hanger going to fit again and look great or will I end up in a pile of clothes with nothing to wear.
Originally I took my color cue from Charlie’s shirt and found a royal blue kimono sleeve maxi-dress that I’d picked for myself, but after 14 photo messages with my sister I settled on a 7 year old burgundy dress that recently started looking cute again and a new pink sweater to tie the gamily plate together All told I only had to buy my sweater, Clara’s dress, and Charlie’s t-shirt, all of which I got for $32 on sale at Old Navy.
As a I pull the potential pieces I will hang them up or lay them flat together on my bed to make sure there is a consistent color story but it isn’t matchy-mathchy. I will sub pieces in and out until I get it close to what I like. I end up swapping out Aaron’s shirt and ditching Magnus’s sweater, but here was the last draft look before the final was implemented. I think it came together well and can’t wait to see the finished pictures!
