It’s true what they say; you project what you love into the photographs you take and while I took my annual break from family photography while wedding season get busy, I started to realised that the photographs of my children I love the most are those that are totally ordinary… Where there clothes are filthy, their hair unbrushed and they’re just being them… Really, it’s the ones of them eating breakfast or rolling on the floor with the dogs. With that in mind, I want my clients to have the opportunity to have that too; portraits are lovely, but the mundane is better. So I started thinking about how I could shoot alternative family photos and my first thought was to try shooting a family for a whole day and see what happened… A day in the life.

Alternative Family Photos

Cue the Wood family who let me into their home when their hair was unbrushed, their morning brew still brewing. I spent the day with them, just shooting what they got up to. And it was lovely! Family meals, dressing up, reading, colouring, blackberry picking, a trip into town for ice cream. Inevitably it wasn’t always big smiles though; Oscar fell off his bike, Esme cut her knee. We had to go to the shops which never rates highly on my list of fun family activities! But when I sat down and looked back at the images, what I realised was that it was the stuff like this that I wanted to remember of my own family. Babies cry… My entire recollection of early motherhood is leaky nappies and wondering what on earth I needed to do to get my babies to stop cry. Toddlerdom was about what had gone wrong every time I left the room. Now they’re nearly 4 and 6 I’m often breaking up fights or just smiling to myself as I drink my (hot) cup of tea as I listen to them playing together or going through the 54 new pictures of fireworks they produced while I was cooking dinner.

This is parenthood. Childhood. This is what I want to show them in 30 years time.

You can find out more about my alternative family photography here.