Never work with children or animals. What about both? Last weekend I was taking photos of my cousins children who are getting their first puppy at Halloween. The puppies ‘live’ 2 doors from them, with their Aunt, so the photo session took place in the puppies home.

So what is a home photography session?

I arrive at your house, workplace or event with my portable studio. It consists of a portable backdrop (looks like a pop up tent for kids but unfolds to 6ft by 5ft), lights, stands and me and my camera. All I need is a clear space, most living rooms are perfect, with at least 7 feet clearance in width. It takes approximately 10-15 minutes to setup (5 to dismantle!) and the session can be over within the hour. If there are children in the house I like to get them involved to some degree as this way they have a chance to relax with me before I start taking photos, however it is my experience that once kids are in front of the camera they start to perform. If you’ve looked through some of my albums you’ll see I sometimes use coloured balls when the kids are getting near the end of the session as I have them jumping and playing so they’re generally worn out and this is a fun way to end the session. It is a complete door to door service, you never leave your front door, I take the photos and within a week the photos are uploaded to a webpage for viewing and choosing, and once the photos are chosen they are delivered to you. No more time booking a photo session within delegated working hours, you choose the time and place.

As I said, last weekend I was taking my cousins children’s photos and as you can see from the photo above, there are no children in the photo! I did actually take their photos and there are some below but the puppies stole the show. The boys had their photos taken first and they were brilliant, everything was ‘deadly’ or ‘cool’ and they were telling me why I was putting umbrellas on lights! I sometimes find with smaller children that if you start the session by ‘playing’ (asking them to jump) the rest of the session unfolds very easily, and once I said I was going to pour a bag of coloured balls over them, the session went extremely quickly to get to the ‘fun’ part.

And then it was time to bring in the puppies, 7 cocker spaniel puppies and their mother, well the mother wasn’t too interested to be honest so she probably got into 8 photos in total. But the puppies were naturals (and how could they not be, they are cute and adorable anyway!) It was definitely hard work getting the puppies lined up, initially we had 7 puppies running about, each time we had 3 or 4 lined up, the others were making a break for the door. After 5 minutes with 3 adults and 3 children lifting and placing the puppies into place, I finally had my cousin on one side of the puppies, her son on the other with their arms outstretched holding them in a line. It was then a case of ‘1, 2, 3, remove your arm’ and snap. After the first 3 photos the puppies started to fade and there is a sequence of photos where they each gradually fall asleep and then proceed to climb on top of each other for warmth and end up curled into a ball of fur. Yes, it was a lot of work but extremely enjoyable, I’m surprised I didn’t ‘pack’ a puppy with my gear on the way out the door!

And how long before they were uploaded? Within 24 hours! I couldn’t resist getting them done that evening, so I spent last Saturday night working on the photos, they were just too nice to leave any longer on the camera!