Family Photo Shoot with Vintage Aston Martin

Each shoot this summer feels has felt particularly special.  I’ve always loved my job but after lockdown I feel even luckier to be able to take pictures for a living. I’m incredibly grateful to my lovely clients who have booked me to photograph their families this year.  Things still aren’t back to normal and it feels a privilege to have work.

July and August have seen me photographing a number of my regular clients who were kind enough to put dates in the diary while lockdown was still in force and it’s such a pleasure to see everyone. To visit their homes and enjoy their beautiful gardens and, in many cases, traveling out of London to see clients has given me an excuse to venture further afield than the five-mile loop around my house that was my daily walk in lockdown.  With clients in Suffolk, Norfolk, Dorset, Devon, Yorkshire and the Cotswolds I’ve certainly been doing my bit to keep the train service in business.

I was thrilled to visit Clemy and her wonderful family.  I’ve been lucky enough to know the family for eight years, my first shoot being back in October 2012.  Since then we’ve had regular sessions to update the family albums, create stunning pictures to frame around the house, and to record the children as they grow.  The girls are such a joy, interesting, intelligent, fierce, and funny, we had a brilliant time.

Often each session is marked by pictures which record a particular point in time. Hobbies that are ‘of the moment’, the games the children currently love to play and I find this fascinating. Some hobbies span the sessions, others come and go. I often wonder which will have the staying power – the skateboard probably, the pogo stick more likely to be of the moment.  But I may be wrong, I can’t wait to find out.

All these interests and hobbies provide creative challenges for me as a photographer. How to take an interesting picture which really captures the activity, but which is also artistic and will stand the test of time. This challenge is one of the things I love most about my job, thinking on my feet as the session progresses.

This session one of the more interesting challenges was how to include the car, a recent acquisition and amazing – a vintage Aston Martin, you really can’t get cooler than that!

Pictures of kids in cars are hard though, how on earth do you make it interesting?  I immediately thought I would want to pan the shot, get a feeling for the movement and so Clemy kindly drove around the village green for me so I could take a picture that was more exciting than just the car outside the house.  I used a slow shutter speed and then moved my camera along with the movement of the car so the girls stayed sharp and the background blurred to give a feeling of speed and movement.

I love the result, the girls were having such fun, and the picture captures the excitement of the moment so well.

I do have some availability for family photography in the autumn so if you would like to take advantage of the beautiful autumn weather and record your family in pictures this year then do get in touch, I’d love to hear from you.