Baby Milestone Photography in Ghorpadi, Pune

A year is four kinds of light

A series across a year is a series across several quite different qualities of daylight.

The same window at the same hour gives noticeably different light in different months, because the sun sits at a different height and the sky is a different thing entirely.

Families do everything else right — same spot, same distance, same plain clothing — and the set still fails to match, for a reason nobody can identify.

It is almost always this. The first sitting was on a bright high-sun day and the second on a soft overcast one, and no amount of matching everything else compensates.

There are two ways round it. Shoot the series at the studio, where the light is identical every time, or shoot each sitting on the kind of day that resembles the first.

The second is more work and it is perfectly possible if we note what the first sitting had.

It is the one genuinely technical thing worth deciding at the start of a series, and it is the one nobody is told.

Where a series is shot at home, it is worth noting the weather at each sitting rather than only the hour.

Bright, overcast, hazy — a one-word note takes a second and it is what makes matching possible at the next sitting.

Without it, matching is guesswork, because nobody remembers what the sky was doing four months ago.

It is also worth accepting that a perfect match is not always achievable at home.

Where it matters a great deal, the studio is the honest answer rather than repeated attempts to reproduce a particular afternoon.

That is a decision worth taking at the first sitting rather than after the third one has failed to match.