Lifestyle and posed photos are both absolutely beautiful, and each style of portrait pictures have their place. While I always try to capture a few traditional posed family photos in each session, my heart is always swooned by the lifestyle pictures. Below I explain why I love lifestyle sessions, and why I encourage my clients to embrace them as well!
1. Lifestyle photos tell the story of your family!
What I love about a lifestyle approach to sessions is the room it allows to tell your family’s story. Photos of your whole family posed perfectly and smiling at the camera are beautiful for sure. The thing is, they don’t capture what makes up your family… personalities, playfulness, joy, love, laughter, silly faces, expressions, hugs, kisses. I want your photos to tell this season of your family’s story! With a lifestyle photo session, we take the pressure off perfectly posed photos and celebrate the beauty that is found within your family. Enjoy the undivided time with your family, love on your babies, let your children be a little playful, and play back with them. The resulting photos will tell the beautiful family story unique to your family! (P.S. If you want to read more about how we work together to achieve these photos check out this blog post.)
2. The Lifestyle approach to sessions allows your littles to move!
Lifestyle photos are meant to tell the story of your family. This approach welcomes unposed photos and natural interactions with your family allowing your young children room to be themselves. It is well known that littles have a hard time sitting still (and that’s okay!). Moving and grooving is healthy for our littles! In a lifestyle session, it’s welcomed that they interact with you throughout the session. As a mom, you know how difficult it is to get your littles to sit still so this relieves a lot of stress and makes a photo session more manageable for everyone!
3. Lifestyle Sessions make taking pictures more enjoyable for the whole family!
When you have littles who don’t want to sit still and your session is focused on perfectly posed and smiling pictures, it makes the entire session miserable for both them and for you. With lifestyle photos, we don’t have to worry about constantly monitoring the kids sitting still, smiling at the camera, looking at the camera, keeping hands away from the face, etc. Lifestyle photos are meant to capture the season of your family. If it’s a busy-body season for your little ones – that’s what we’ll capture! It takes the stress off the whole session for you and keeps them happier, too! Let the weight of perfection go and embrace the beauty of your children’s personalities you love.
4. Lifestyle Photos allow More variety in your gallery!
Once we get a photo of everyone smiling at the camera, we’ve got it. Even if we rearrange people a little bit or move to a different area at our location, the photos generally all look pretty similar. As your photographer, I want to make sure you get the most out of your investment by capturing a variety of photos to tell the story of your family. With a lifestyle session, we can get a larger variety of photos to document your family’s season more thoroughly and make the most of your investment! And don’t worry, I’ll do my best to get a picture of everyone smiling at the camera, too!
5. Lifestyle Sessions allow photo sessions to be a fun family activity!
I know a lot of times photo sessions are dreaded by parents and kiddos alike because it feels like this impossible and miserable task for everyone to behave and smile at the same time to get perfect photos. I encourage my clients to approach their session with a mindset of excitement and relaxing. Excitement that you have undistracted time with your family to relax and celebrate your love in a unique way! Lifestyle sessions can be approached with excitement instead of dread because the session style is truly set-up to capture photos of you enjoying time with your family instead of worrying about everyone’s best smile or perfect behavior in front of the camera. And I promise, we’ll still get incredible photos you’ll love!
So what do you think… does a lifestyle portrait session sound like the way to go for your family?!
