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HELEN BARTLETT / FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY

Indoor Games for Fun Family Photos

Photography in my client’s homes

‘It’s really nice having them in and around our home too. So meaningful and personal.’ I love getting feedback from my clients about their pictures.

There have been a lot of indoor sessions recently, cold days and wet days as April lives up to its reputation for unpredictable weather. We’re due a bit more sunshine now May is here, I’m ready for it to warm up.

This picture is from a recent family photography session up in Newcastle. I do travel a fair amount for work even though the majority of my sessions are in London where I live. It’s always fun to go somewhere new and very humbling when I’m invited to travel to see people at the other end of the country.

Working in people’s homes has various challenges for us as photographers and I find rising to these to be incredibly fulfilling on a personal level. I love the creativity of my job, how each day I go somewhere new and how I often don’t know what kind of environment I’ll be working in. I photograph families in a wide variety of different homes from large luxury homes to tiny flats and everything in between. The one thing they have in common is clients who love photography and who are happy to invest in the very best family photography, creating lasting memories for them and their children to enjoy for many years to come.

When I arrive at my clients homes the first thing I do is look at the light, where it is and how much there is. I work with natural light a lot of the time and so understanding light and shadows is integral to achieving a good result.

Here the main light was coming in from the window but there was a secondary smaller light source at the back of the house. For the family group shots I used the window as my main light but then, as we were playing I decided to mix things up a bit and backlight some images to give me a cleaner background and a different feel to the pictures. As I have mentioned in other blog posts I love to show my clients homes in their pictures, these are the places they live and play and each element will be full of memories from the cushions on the sofa to the carpet where the children lie for hours playing with their toys.

Here we were playing a building game – the parents – a civil engineer and an architect were enjoying the competition of who could build the highest tower while the baby had their nap and this moment of complete joy as the tower is completed makes me smile every time I look at it.

I love everyone’s expressions but the little boy most of all, standing on tip-toe as he places the final piece and….wait for it…it doesn’t fall over. What joy, what fun, what a wonderful moment and what family photography is all about.

If you want to learn more about my family photography then do take a look at the website where you will see examples across all ages and find out more information about how my photo shoots work.