From the course: Douglas Kirkland on Photography: Photographing Kids and Families

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts.

Family portraits in the studio

Family portraits in the studio

(music playing) Very often, families, in the end, fall more in love with the picture you do in the studio than the one that's in many ways more significant to me, the available light one. Kids have maybe never seen anything like we have in our studio here. We put a sweep a paper down, just to get a clear simple background. I got Joel and Ona to sit on the floor, because I wanted them to be able to have James stand beside them and their head levels would be more or less the same. When you have a family, a large number of people especially, it's quite different. I, for example, photographed an Italian family with something like seventeen people in one picture. What you do is you think of the oldest person, the most senior people. They probably go in the center, because they should get the most respect. If it's just mom and dad and a couple of kids, you sit them down comfortably or stand them together and build around that. It's funny, you often have to tell people "move closer, closer…

Contents