What Does a Year in the Life Photography Session Actually Look Like?
A Year in the Life session might not sound all that exciting on paper.
For this family, I arrived in the evening while dinner was being prepared. They ate. They cleaned up the kitchen. The kids took a bath. We ended the night reading books together in the nursery. That's pretty much it. And honestly, that's exactly the point.
A Year in the Life isn't about coming up with something interesting to photograph every time I show up. It's about documenting what your family is actually doing at this particular point in time, and giving all of those ordinary things a little more attention than we usually do. Believe it or not, you will miss the boring stuff.
A typical evening
When I arrived, dinnertime was already underway. There was food being prepared, people moving around the kitchen, and all of the usual activity that happens when a family is trying to get everyone fed. I photographed the cooking, the keeping the baby busy, and the little interactions.
Nothing particularly unusual happened.
Eventually everyone sat down to eat. After dinner came cleanup. Then bath time. Then pajamas and books in the nursery. It was a completely normal evening.
But look at these photographs a year from now, and the normal stuff starts to become pretty interesting. The size of the baby. What she was eating. The way she got put right onto the counter to drink out of her cup with help. What the nursery looked like. How everyone interacted with each other. All of those things change, and they change quickly.
This is what I love about Year in the Life
As a candid family photographer in Atlanta, I'm not looking for the big, obvious moments every time I photograph a family. I'm looking for the things that are happening in between them. Those details are easy to overlook when you're living them. They're also the things that tend to disappear first. The way she drops her spoon off the edge of the highchair, or the way she grabs Mom’s hair every chance she gets.
A year from now, this family will still have dinner. They'll still clean up. They'll still take baths and read books. But it won't look like this.
Their baby will be a year older, and their routines will change. The nursery might look completely different. The things that feel so familiar right now will have quietly moved on.
It doesn't have to be exciting
I think there's sometimes a misconception that you need to plan something special for a family photography session. You don't! You can make dinner, go to the playground, do homework, give the kids a bath. You can do all of the completely unremarkable things that make up your actual life. I’ll pay attention to them, and show you how beautiful they are.
And because I work in a candid, documentary style, I'm not trying to turn those activities into a series of posed family portraits. I'm looking for the photographs that show what this particular season of your family's life feels like. There's an editorial side to the way I approach family photography. I'm thinking about light, composition, layers, details, and how the photographs work together as a whole. So while the activity might be ordinary, I'm still looking for interesting ways to photograph it.
Sometimes that means stepping back and letting the whole room tell the story. Sometimes it means getting close to a tiny detail. Sometimes the best photograph is happening in the background while everyone is focused on something else.
That's where the “boring” stuff gets interesting. And the really fun part is putting together multiple sessions from a year into one album, where you see the change that was happening all along.
A year from now, we'll do it again
That's the part I love most about Year in the Life photography. We aren't trying to capture everything in one session, we have time.
This evening is one piece of their story. Another session might look completely different. Over the course of a year, all of those ordinary days start to add up to something much bigger: a record of what your family was actually like during this particular year.
And eventually, these photos become even more than a collection of nice family pictures in a gorgeous heirloom album. They're a reminder of the life you were living. Even the boring nights. Especially those.
Are you interested in making a time capsule for your family? Let’s talk
