Since you’ve put in the work of making it all the way to my blog post, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: as Michigan Family Photographers, we know it’s nearly IMPOSSIBLE to get a good picture of everyone, luckily for you we are photoshop wizards.
Picture it: your two-year-old Mr. Independent is in his own little world and won’t listen (or smile) for anyone, except for the mere two seconds that peek-a-boo caught his attention. Your five-year-old listens alright, but is SO distracted by all the scenery and shenanigans going on to make little brother smile, that he gives only fleeting smiles to the camera, but of course not at the same time as brother. And even though you can hold a smile longer than any human should possibly be able to, baby boy is getting heavy on your hip and you’re starting to feel defeated that he won’t listen. Naturally, your smile fades a bit.
BUT NOT TO WORRY, because this is where the MAGIC happens!
Almost every family photos session with kids requires some Photoshop head swap work, and we’ve done it so many times now that if I really needed to, I could probably do it in my sleep (pretty sure our record for one session was 15 head swaps. Yes, you read that right… 15!).
And that is also why we take approximately 100,000,000 pictures when our little subjects are being stubborn. Because we know that if we keep you all in the same pose for long enough, we will get that beaming, genuine smile from each of you, and then merge all those pretty faces onto one stunning showstopper of an image that you’ll proudly want to display in your living room for years to come, so all your visitors can see how well-behaved your boys were for picture day. 😉
From our work as Michigan family photographers, you can see that we also LOVE those candid photos where we get everyone playing together and not looking at the camera, and despite the candid nature, these types of photos are not immune to the head swap either!
Below is a before and after from a recent session of a similar situation as described above.
