Taking por­traits of fam­i­lies is a lot hard­er than I expect­ed. It’s not so much the amount of light and large depth-of-field required (although that does play a part), but the fact that there are so many things going on at once. Getting every­one to co-ordi­nate what they’re doing becomes expo­nen­tial­ly dif­fi­cult with every extra per­son. And if only one per­son blinks, the pho­to is ruined.

One of the biggest assets a pho­tog­ra­ph­er can have is a sense of humour. If you can make your mod­el laugh, you low­er their appre­hen­sive­ness, which brings down their guard and pro­vides you with much more nat­ur­al expres­sions. Not to men­tion the fact that it’s a plea­sure to see some­one smil­ing or laugh­ing.

 

Still play­ing around with black-and-white tones. This time, I went with less con­trast, so more of a low-key feel, not just in the over­all scene but in the fig­ures them­selves. In doing so, the tex­ture isn’t so blown-out as in my pre­vi­ous black-and-whites.

I love the dreamy look of high-key, but for more focus on facial fea­tures, I’m start­ing to turn to a greater range of light.

 

In return for mod­el­ing for some of my oth­er projects, I agreed to give Agnes and Soph some por­traits. Siblings are gen­er­al­ly easy to work with. There’s a com­fort­ing famil­iar­i­ty that lets them act nat­u­ral­ly togeth­er. To tell them apart, one sim­ply has to observe how dif­fer­ent­ly each acts in front of a cam­era.