5 reasons you should have family portraits taken every year
Does anyone else feel like days are just slipping by so quickly? With busy work schedules and school timetables and not to mention the after school activities it’s easy to let life get in the way and forget to have those yearly family portraits taken.
My Dad is a photographer and has been my entire life, and every single year we have family portraits taken, we call them out “Wall Pictures” because a headshot of each of us goes up on the wall outside our old childhood bedrooms every single year. We have space for 16 framed images and so each year we get to take one down to put the latest up. Thankfully all of our ugly awkward teenage years are now being kept safetly away in a box, away from visitors eyes!
But we still do it. Every single year, we used to do it on the first day of school and since we left school we now do it Christmas eve.
Here are five reasons why taking family portraits regularly is important.
Creating a timeline for your family
Families change, marriages, babies, deaths, kids going off to university it’s easy fo all these events to smoosh up into the same timeline when you don’t have images to document it. Over the past 5 years 4 of my cousins have gotten married and 3 babies have been born (with another cousin expecting soon) this changes the landscape of our extended family, but also our individual families too.
2. It’s not just about you, it’s for the future generations too!
I am obsessed with old photos. It blows my mind that my mum looks exactly like her grandmother when they were both children. I love seeing old photos of my Nana in a time before I even knew her. Having these old photos connects us to our past ancestors, it' gives them faces we would otherwise have not known.
3. It documents growth
One of my favourite things about being a photographer is having families come back to me for regular family portraits. I love watching the kids grow up and building a rapport with them. as they grow older they get to know me, and that I’m there to take photos and it comes easier with each year that passes.
4. You don’t know when the last chance will be
My Nana died in 2018 after several years of health problems. For probably the last 5 years before she died we would make an effort to get our extended family together at least once a year for whatever reason. It became this running joke that “This would be the last Christmas” and every time we would take family portraits. We added partners and children to the mix in those 5 years and if we had only made the effort to take the portraits the first time several members of our family would be missing from the last family portraits we took with Nana. For 5 years we said “This will be the last christmas” (almost jokingly after the second year) but we didn’t realise when it actually was until it was too late.
5. I don’t know how long the cloud will last
After Nana’s funeral we spent the rest of the day sitting on the lounge room floor going through old shoeboxes of photographs she had. There’s just something about passing around an old photo album or prints that passing around your smartphone doesn’t have. We think that the cloud and facebook are safe spaces to store our photos, but I dare you to try and find photos from 15 years ago when MySpace was a safe space to store your photos. Having photographs taken regularly AND printing them are so important.
Making it easy
I've recently put processes in place to remind families when it’s been a year since their last family portraits. It’s something I’ve always had in place for Newborns and I suddenly had an Ah Ha moment realising that it’s probably easier for me to keep track than it is for you! I also try to make it easy for anyone to come and have regular portraits taken, so once you’re a client of mine you don’t need to pay the $150 session fee ever again. just book in whenever you’re ready, no deposit, nothing!
For this month I am also waiving the session fee for any new clients!
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