Is a family photoshoot worth the money?
Let me be upfront about the awkwardness here. I'm a photographer. I'd like you to book a photoshoot. So if you're reading this hoping for a balanced view, you have every right to be suspicious of the person writing it.
But I've been doing this a long time, and I've watched enough families go through the decision to have a genuine opinion about it, including about when the answer should be no. So here's what I actually think, rather than what would be most useful for me to say.
Sometimes it isn't worth it
I'll start here, because I mean it.
If money is tight, don't book a photoshoot. There is no version of this where photographs matter more than the electricity bill or the school shoes. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
If you've just had a big expense, or you're between jobs, or things are simply harder than usual at the moment, the photos will keep. Your children will still be your children next year, and the year after. This is not a closing window.
If someone in your family really doesn't want to do it, that's also a good reason to wait. A photoshoot with a resentful teenager or a partner who's been talked into it is a difficult hour for everyone and it shows in the pictures.
And if you have a friend who takes lovely photographs and would happily spend an afternoon with your family, that's a wonderful thing to have. Say yes to it. It costs you nothing and the photos will mean a great deal.
None of this is false modesty. I'd rather you didn't book than book something you can't afford or don't want.
So when is it worth it?
Here's the thing I notice, over and over, and it took me years of doing this to understand properly.
You have thousands of photographs of your children. Your phone is full of them. And not a lot of them include you.
Because you're the one holding the phone. You're the one who says "stand next to your sister," who crouches down to get the shot, who takes multiple versions because the first few were blurry. You are behind the camera in every single one, which means you're absent from all of them.
Scroll back through a year and count the photographs of you with your children. Photos of you and them together, doing something ordinary. For most parents, the answer is somewhere between none and a handful, and the handful are usually selfies taken at arm's length, or a blurry one from Christmas where somebody's blinking.
That's what you're buying. Not better photographs than your phone can take, phones are extraordinary now, and I say that as someone whose living depends on cameras. You're buying an hour in which you get to be in your family rather than documenting it.
And it isn't only the big group portrait, it's you and your youngest, mid-cuddle. Your partner with the children climbing all over him. Your two eldest together, in that particular way they are with each other and nobody else. All the combinations that make up a family, none of which exist on your phone, because you were the one taking the picture.
What you're paying for
An hour of my time, and then a good deal more that you never see.
Some of it is the noticing. For that hour, my entire job is to watch your family. Not to keep anyone fed or safe or from falling off anything, just to watch. The way your son leans against you without thinking about it. The face your daughter makes when she's concentrating. How you look at each other when you've both forgotten I'm there.
You can't see those things while you're living them. Nobody can. You're too close, and you're too busy. That's not a failing, it's just what it is to be in the middle of your own life.
And then the rest of it happens quietly at a desk, days after you've forgotten about the whole thing.
Editing is the part people don't think about, and it takes far longer than the photoshoot itself. I go through every frame, choose the ones worth keeping, and then work on each one individually - the light, the colour, the warmth or coolness of the tones, the small distractions at the edges. It isn't a filter.
Because the mood matters. A photoshoot on a soft grey morning shouldn't look like one taken in strong evening light, and neither should look like a stock photograph. What I'm trying to get right is how it actually felt to be there - the quality of the light, the warmth of your home, whether it was a bright, noisy morning or a quiet one. When it works, you don't notice the editing at all. You just look at the photos and something in you recognises the day.
So the noticing happens twice. Once in the room, and once afterwards, on my own.
That's genuinely what the money is for. It's not the camera.
The other thing nobody mentions
Your phone photos are on your phone.
They will stay there, in among the screenshots and the pictures of the parking space and the receipt you photographed in case you needed it. Some of them will make it to the cloud. Some won't. Phones get dropped, lost, and replaced. Accounts get forgotten. It's not that digital photos disappear exactly, it's that they become unreachable in practice, buried under forty thousand others, never looked at again.
A photoshoot tends to break that pattern, mainly because you've paid for it. You look at the gallery properly. You choose favourites. Quite often you print something, and it goes on a wall, where you see it every day for ten years. Your children grow up seeing a picture of their family on the wall.
I'm not making a grand argument here. It's just a practical observation about how people actually behave.
A middle path
If a full photoshoot isn't right for you at the moment, there are things worth doing that cost nothing.
Hand your phone to someone else occasionally and ask them to take a few. Ask your partner to photograph you with the children rather than the children on their own. Get in the picture, even if you don't like how you look in it.
Print something. Anything. A cheap print of a phone photo on a wall is worth more than a perfect image nobody ever sees.
And if you'd like something more than that, one day, I'll still be here.