One of the challenges with shooting for portrait albums is getting enough variety to fill and album. You can’t shoot a bunch of shots against a white background and have the variety for an album. At least I can’t.
Most of our portrait sessions are done outside. This can be a challenge in the Great Northwest. But we work to coordinate with the client to have a couple of backup options. I’ll be presenting a recent portrait session here. For this particular portrait session, I chose a local location with a variety of backgrounds. Along with the variety of backgrounds I made sure to include a variety of shooting styles, from backlit to front lit, from shooting straight on to shooting down.
By having a lot of variety I ensured that I would have enough shots and, more importantly, enough different shots, that I could tell a short story about this family.
A typical family album for our studio is 10 pages (as in a book) or 5 spreads. We can go longer, but I feel that this is a good page length for a family album. We use Finao’s Elements series exclusively. We have options ranging from 5″-10″ in size and offer leather album upgrades in our higher packages.
Without further ado, here are some images from our latest family shoot:
Fundy
Fundy is the creator of the Fundy Album Builder album design software. You can download a free trial here. Additionally he is launching a new Studio Management software solution, more information here.
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5 Comments at "Shooting for Family Albums"
Thank you! This is great info. I’m surprised at the 10 pages though. I would have thought that 20 is more common.
Sarah,
Thanks for the comments.
For me, I want to show Amazing work to the client. With a twenty page book you’d need between 18 and 24 shots. To get that many amazing shots at a portrait shoot would be amazing in of itself. I’m not talking good here, but amazing.
Fundy
I don’t know if this is an appropriate question, but how are you doing your pricing for the session/album? Are you offering any credit from the session towards the album? Is the session/album priced as a package item apart from prints? The reason I’m asking is that I find, with weddings as well as portraits, most clients consider albums too costly. I have not been able to sell the concept of albums very well in today’s economy. Many people are content with a few prints – and not even large prints! How do you sell the advantage of an album for a family session?
Thanks,
Lou
Lou,
I don’t think it is advantageous to discuss actual pricing in an open blog atmosphere, but I can tell you that 90% of our family albums are sold in packages along with prints and other products.
So that might be something to look into for your studio.
Fundy
Thanks Fundy, that helps. I like the idea of doing albums for family sessions and I always do a mix of outdoor/indoor which yields a decent amount of images to choose from.
Lou
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