The Sheehan Family - Family Portraits at Hollybank

After a false start and a reschedule due to wet weather we ended up with a beautiful day out at Hollybank forest Reserve to photograph Paul and Tammy and their three children, Cannon, El’anna and Samuel for their family portraits. These guys had never had professional family portraits taken so it was really important to me to be able to capture some beautiful images for them.

When Tammy and Paul asked me to photograph their family, they had a special request to incorporate their child Jordan, who passed away at 5 months old almost 17 years ago. I was set with a tough job, they only had a few images of Jordan, which weren’t the best quality, and I also didn’t want to try to photoshop Jordan into the family images. It made no sense to photograph a baby into their family portraits, but I also didn’t want to represent Jordan as the teenager she would have been today as both of those options were not a realistic portrayal of their family.

So I took the images which Tammy had sent me and printed and matted them to include Jordan in the family portraits.

Tammy had decided that she wanted an album for her family portraits, knowing this made shooting for an album so much easier. I always ask clients to come into the studio for a pre-shoot consult appointment. During the consult I show you all of the different options for products and hopefully get you thinking about what you would like to take home with you. I always tell people that they don’t need to make any final decisions about what they want to take home until the viewing session, but if you have an idea about what you want to do with your images when it comes to the viewing it will make choosing the actual images a whole lot easier. AND if you have an idea at your shoot, I’ll be able to shoot for your vision!

Shooting for an album is very different to shooting for a single hero image to be framed on the wall! An album requires a lot more variety so photographing everyone in multiple locations and making sure I have photographed every combination of family members together is especially important.