We’ll get photos when I lose weight. When my hair grows. When my second grader’s front teeth grow in. We just had a baby, I won’t have time for photos for years. My kids are in elementary school and are very active and may not listen. We’ll wait for later to get photos. My kids are in high school and they probably won’t want photos done with their family. I just got divorced. I was just widowed. It’s winter, it’s too cold. Summer is too hot. It’s hard to get my family together. We don’t have outfits good for photos.

What do all of the above, and more, have in common? All are reasons that you may decide that now is NOT a good time for your family photos. That little voice in your head may be telling you one of these things. I get it. As a RI family photographer, I’ve talked to lots of families who have concerns about the timing of their photos. They have concerns that now might not be the right time. They might not even be sure when the right time will be, if ever.

I want you to take a look around. Look at your walls. Look at your bookshelves. Look at photo albums. Look at all the places that you keep your photos. Now tell me, when were those images taken? Was your last family photo when your youngest was an infant but he’s in third grade now? Do you have many, many photos of your oldest child but photos of subsequent children dwindle off in quantity? (Trust me…I get it…I’m the oldest of five and there is not much photographic evidence that the youngest two of my siblings actually exist). Do you have any photos at all of yourself with your parents, or your children with their grandparents? The bottom line is this. The best time is NOW. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. The images that are captured at the session are ones you will love and you’ll realize why all those anxieties you had about it being the wrong time weren’t worth listening to.

I’ve seen the happiness over and over in clients’ faces when they receive their images from their session and realize “now” was worth it. But also, I can relate from several of my own personal experiences as well.

As mentioned above, there are five children in my family. I’m the oldest and also the only girl. There are very few images of the five of us together. By “very few”, I mean two. Maybe. This is one of them. My mom took it when my youngest brother was an infant. The print hangs on the refrigerator at my parents’ house. Obviously the level of engagement varies between all of us, to say the least.

A few years ago, I realized that all of us were grown up and there was little evidence that my parents actually had five children who had been successfully raised to adulthood. I thought it would be special for them to have a photo of us together. While it was a bit like pulling teeth to get my brothers to agree to this, we ended up with a photo that my parents love, which I printed large and which hangs in a special place on their wall. Setting up my camera on a tripod and spending a bit of time directing my (slightly uncooperative) brothers was absolutely worth it to see how happy my parents were, and are, with their photo.

My mother is one of six children. Three girls and three boys. My mother also hates having her photo taken. HATES. IT. There are some images of her when I was very young, but she managed to avoid the camera for a lot of years. Slowly but surely I’ve been able to convince her to let me take her photo from time to time.

My mother’s youngest sister has early onset Alzheimer’s, and I know that any time that is spent with any of her siblings is precious, especially time spent with her sisters. On several different Thanksgivings, including this past one, I’ve taken photos of my mother with her sisters. I give her a print for Christmas and I know that it’s something that she loves. I’ll wrangle them outside while my mother complains about her hair, her outfit, the fact that she was just doing dishes. And I will say…I. Don’t. Care. I don’t see any of that, I just see my mother and my aunts. I just want photos of you, and I want you to have photos of each other. That’s finally clicked for my mom, and I’m so happy to have more photos of her because she’s realizing that maybe she just shouldn’t put off having some taken.

Your “best time” for photos is now. What are you waiting for? Let’s schedule your session.

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