How long will your family photo session take?

I really want to talk for just a few minutes about a question I get all the time, which is how long is our session going to take? But what I want to get into is the details, not just with this specific time number, but I want to tell you about why.

Typically a photo session, I always say for a standard nuclear family, it's going to take about 45 minutes.

If it's an extended family, I then will use the words about an hour.

that's how long I like to give for the time for an extended family. But the real answer is going to be it's going to depend on the weather, on, the conditions, on the people in the group, on how everybody is holding up. Sometimes you end up with some toddlers who are having so much fun playing in the waves and running on the beach or chasing butterflies in the park that I see no reason to cut a session off because we've hit a certain time, if there are photos happening, if there's life happening and it's creating opportunities for us to photograph, but also to just be casual, relax, have some fun together. I'm not going to stop your session.

If it's a full session, it's not going to happen. We might be chit chatting and vibing and having a great time talking and then we're going to be together for longer the day. Other the amount of time taking the photos might not be a full hour, but we might be hanging out for an hour because we're having such a great time, getting along so well.

And I'm a talkative person, I never see the reason to cut somebody off and send them home because we've hit your time limit. You're not paying for your photo session based on your time. It's a big misconception. People will say, I don't think I need 45 minutes, I think I only need 30.

What you're paying for is the experience.

Sometimes it might be 20 minutes. We get every photo you could possibly dream of. Everybody's got eye contact when we need it, not when we don't. Everything's perfect and in 20 minutes we've knocked it out of the park and you're off, you're off to your next adventure and things are great.

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Typically I like to say 30, but like I said, we're going to vibe with the mood. I don't see a reason to rush you out of there for any reason. What I really like to do is get all of the important photos that I know are on my shot list in the first 15 minutes, 20,

if I'm going slow. But in 15 minutes, if I can knock it right out of the park, I know everything that I had on the shot list is taken. We've got all of those photos maybe only in one location or one backdrop, but we've got them all. Then we can flip flop to another backdrop and see what other photos can develop, see what other situations we can get into, see what other fun we can create.

That's when I tend to find on that second kind of set backdrop, that's when things get so relaxed. So casual kids are less weirded out by my being in their face with a camera. And we can just kind of relax into having some fun. So while I know the first few minutes of your session are going to be very formal, because we want to hit all those markers after, that's when the magic can happen.

And magic does not come with a timetable.

So when people do say, I think my kid's not gonna be able to sit still for 45, that's fine. I'm just giving you 45 as a framework. It's certainly not do or die tried and true.

We're not setting timers. There's no timer happening, during your full family session because that's just not how magic works. I'm giving you a timeframe. We have a goal in mind. We have an average. I can tell you how long these things typically take, but less sometimes is all you need. More is sometimes exactly what you need. And we're going to figure it out when we're together. So from 30 to 60, landing around 45, that's how long your family session is going to take. Maybe.

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