Family Photo Shoot

We take a lot of photos of our kids and of us as a family, but while we’ve done studio shoots with our respective families when we both graduated from University more than 2 decades ago and thereafter also pre-wedding 12 years ago, we haven’t had one with Hannah and Peter. These shoots can be quite expensive to do: photographer and printing fees can routinely run from several hundred dollars for the very basic ones where you’ll just get a handful of prints, to thousands of moola easily if you want the trimmings.

The extended family was initially exploring the possibility of organizing a photoshoot for all fourteen of us. And as the designate photographer enthusiast in the extended family, I had specific preferences on how any shoot should be done, and what parts of the workflow I could takeover myself to reduce the overall cost of engaging a studio to do the shoot. First and foremost among them that I’d prefer to get all digital copies and in RAW so that I can do my own cropping and exposure adjustments. Really, the thought of slogging through a session only to get a handful of shots back was personally unappealing! I’m fully cognizant though that you get what you pay for, and hiring experienced professionals would net assurances of high quality albeit selected shots. But this is one of those odd situations where a large number of so-so but still memorable and cheeky pictures are more important to me than one or two beautifully done up portraits.

I also wasn’t fussed up over any bundled print versions or retouching services that are typically included in a studio package, on account that I could engage printers on my own to do any large prints for framing at home. And I always prefer photographic subjects to be as they are and without using post-processing to change how we look. Yep – I’m exactly the kind of client that photographers would rather avoid, as these are pretty unreasonable requirements! Few photographers will supply all digital copies, and even if they did, for certain not the RAW versions. The reasons I guess might be a mix of wanting to protect the photographer’s right to creative IP, as a continued revenue stream when the client wants additional prints, and that RAW files will easily reveal any imperfections in technique.

So, the only kind of photographer who’d be agreeable to these conditions would be those that you’re friends with and are willing to do this (huge) favor. We eventually gave up on the extended family shoot – not because we couldn’t find the right photographer or that we weren’t going to pay the princely fees even if we found one. Rather, it was because parents felt it was too much of a hassle, as they were already very happy with the family pictures I casually take whenever we have our family events.

Still, that’s not stopping us from having our own session. And as luck would have it, I have an ex-student – who also is a teacher now haha – who does cosplay photography and has his own studio. Ever since he completed from his course of studies in 2013, he’d been wanting to do a shoot with us as a family. But we kept putting it off, and we were also literally in different countries.

As luck would have it, our Jakarta-based photographer-friend was in town for the Easter holiday weekend, and he asked if we’d like to do a shoot. So, after a quick booking at a photo studio in Paya Lebar, we were good to go. And a two hour shoot later, I had about 368 RAW exposures to post-process. No, our poses are by no means perfect – we didn’t do much research on what poses to do or props to bring – but I’ve never been too fussed about that either. These studio shoots are intended just to capture us at a specific moment in time, and I’d rather we don’t look or do anything that doesn’t really show who we are as persons.

Of the 368 exposures, a number were spoiled because Peter was being the precocious four year old he is haha. I reckon about 60 were actually quite decent – by my standards anyway. Of that, here’s a small selection below. I did some cropping – as the backdrop was frequently just barely large enough for us – and very minor lighting adjustments since the lighting was spot-on for the most part. The selection of photos here are pretty close to out-of-camera. The equipment we used was a Nikon D750 with just the Nikkor 50mm f1.4 lens, with all pictures at WB5000K, 1/125s, f8 and ISO200.