Many clients contact me this time of year looking for a session with their entire extended family. It is a great time of year to update your family portraits and the beach at sunset is the perfect place to get photos of your family together. I always love to photograph large families and have photographed many of these sessions throughout my career.

Large group family photo sessions are a lot of fun to capture, but they do require some strategic planning and coordinating, especially if there are young cousins involved. To capture the images one is hoping for, I send out a questionnaire prior to your session, which will help me learn who I am photographing and the age of the children. It will also help me learn your goals for the sessions, groupings and types of images you are looking for and other pertinent details. This will help me to plan my time with you properly and time is of the essence with a beach sunset photo session.

Once we get all of the technical stuff out of the way, I can help you to plan your entire family’s wardrobe. This can be the most challenging part of a family photo session, but I am here to help guide you. I can help you choose a color palette and I can even send over suggestions for outfits. You also have exclusive access to Style & Select, which will help you to curate a wardrobe. Most importantly, I now have a client closet with womens dresses available on loan to clients. My goal is to make the process as easy and stress free as possible for you. This family utilized all of the above options and looked absolutely fantastic on the day of their beach family photo session.

The weather was completely whacky on the evening of this session ranging from dense cloudy skies, to hazy skies, to a drizzle of rain, a sudden burst of golden sunlight and a rainbow replete with a pink sky. I can work in all of these lighting conditions and as you can see from the photos, you can still get gorgeous images in all of the above situations. In fact, cloudy skies are becoming my favorite type of weather to photograph families in. I just love the moody look of the images and the dense clouds add such visual interest. I was pleasantly surprised when the sun made its appearance because I love sunsets and photographing families in them.

This extended family session was a blast and I made sure to capture both posed images and more organic and natural images as well. Although most grandmas want those traditional posed images, I find they are often grateful to have the more natural and interactive images as well.

Here are a few of my favorites from the session. I still have one or two dates left for the Summer 2022 season. If you are interested, contact me.