Family Photography in Mundhwa, Pune

Assembling everyone

This is the session that gets postponed for years, and never because of the photography.

It is postponed because fifteen people have fifteen calendars, and the date that suits everybody does not exist.

Waiting for it is how families end up with a twelve-year gap. The date that suits everyone is not coming.

The workable approach is to pick a date when most people can come, accept that one or two cannot, and photograph the family that is there.

That sounds like settling and it is the opposite. A photograph of thirteen people exists; a photograph of fifteen that was never taken does not.

Practically it also means the session is ordered by who has to leave first. Anyone on a deadline is photographed early, in every combination they are needed for, before anything relaxed begins.

It is worth being deliberate about the combinations as well as the whole group, because those are what actually get used.

A parent with each child, the grandparents together, the siblings without spouses. Each takes two minutes and each is far more likely to be printed than the group of fifteen.

Left to the day, the group photograph happens and the combinations do not, because by then everybody has relaxed and nobody wants to be organised again.

Taken first, while people are still standing where they were put, all of them happen easily.

It is also worth allowing that some people will not want to be photographed at all, and that is worth knowing beforehand rather than negotiating in front of everyone.

Told in advance, we simply work around them.

Where somebody genuinely cannot attend at all, it is worth photographing the group anyway rather than postponing again.

A second, smaller sitting with the missing person later is a far more achievable plan than another attempt at assembling everybody.