Baby Milestone Photography in Vishrantwadi, Pune

A set, seen together

A series only works if the frames are ever seen side by side.

That sounds obvious and it is the part that most often does not happen. Three sittings across a year end up in three separate galleries and are never once viewed as a sequence.

When they are meant to be displayed together, that has to be true of the photographs themselves — same orientation, same proportion, same distance from the subject.

A landscape frame and an upright one do not hang together whatever else they have in common, and that is decided at the moment of shooting rather than afterwards.

So the useful thing to settle at the first sitting is not the theme. It is whether these are going to be seen as a group, and roughly in what arrangement.

Answer that once and every subsequent sitting simply repeats it.

Distance from the subject is the variable people forget, and it matters more than the background does.

Three sittings shot at three different distances do not read as a sequence even when everything else matches, because the child appears to change size for reasons that have nothing to do with growing.

Noting roughly where the camera stood is enough to fix it, and it takes a moment at the first sitting.

Everything else in the room can change freely.

It is also worth keeping the same person in frame across the sittings if a parent is going to appear at all.

A sequence where the child is held by a different person each time reads as a set of separate occasions rather than a progression.

Where that is not practical, keeping the parent out of all of them works better than having them in some.