What To Wear?
What should we wear to our photo session?
This is a great question to ask yourself well before the day of your pictures! It often does take some time and thought and planning to get just the right outfits ready for everyone in the family.
Here are a few tips to help you through the process and make sure you look great!
1. MOM – Figure out what YOU want to wear FIRST. Often times moms make the mistake of picking out the kids’ clothing first and then trying to find something to go with it for themselves.
Picking out clothes for family photos is truly a, “Put the oxygen mask on yourself first,” type of situation!
You will end up being much happier in the end if you choose something that you feel fabulous in and then choose the kids’ clothes to coordinate with YOU.
2. After Mom’s perfect outfit has been found, use it to create a color palette. Everyone in the family should coordinate without matching exactly.
In other words: don’t come in a family uniform. If everyone is wearing a white shirt and jeans, it ends up looking kinda uninteresting and even worse: Very dated. And really, NO ONE ends up looking their best.
It’s great to choose several colors in your palette. Include one or two neutrals and a couple of fun colors that everyone in the family can use in their own way.
3. Accessorize! Feel free to throw on some colorful bracelets, necklaces, earrings, a colorful belt, etc.
4. Dress in layers! Weather permitting, layers add great depth and texture to the photos and are a great way to incorporate more of your color palette.
5. Shoes will show! Make sure you really like whatever shoes everyone is wearing. They will show in pictures. (For beach photos, you’ll be barefoot, so not applicable)
6. Make sure little girls have something under their dresses like shorts or bloomers. If you have a baby or toddler still in diapers and you choose to use tights, please use bloomers over the tights. A visible diaper in a photo is very difficult and sometimes impossible to edit out.
7. Try to avoid t-shirts with cartoon characters or writing on them unless you are intentionally choosing a casual theme and other people are wearing jeans and t-shirts with graphics on them. In general, everyone should coordinate level of casualness.
8. Men and boys look great in collared shirts. They frame the face nicely and look wonderful in photos.
9. Carefully consider shorts. This one is kinda complicated because shorts can look good or bad depending on a variety of factors. Just be sure that everyone matches as far as how casual they are dressed and shorts will work just fine!
10. Men should avoid wearing sandals. Sports sandals (like those plastic ones) are a no for anyone for any session. I will make you go barefoot! True story!!! Barefoot looks best for beach sessions. If you have anyone in your party who has a strong aversion to sand or water or going barefoot, I recommend choosing a park or field session.
11. Be sure everyone can comfortably sit on the ground in what they are wearing. If anyone in your family is incapable of sitting on the ground for medical reasons, please alert me ahead of time so I can plan posing and props and your session location accordingly.
12. In general it’s best to come looking how you want to look in your pictures. Some things are easy fixes in photoshop. Others are not. It’s best not to bank on the hope that I can “just photoshop it.” I include some basic retouching in every session and I can fix certain things in photoshop, but not everything.
An overabundant amount of extra editing due to avoidable things like wrinkled clothes, highlights in your hair grown out, dirt on kids faces, unbrushed teeth, scuffed shoes, etc, may incur additional editing fees and/or extra processing time after your session.
