When I’m photographing families I always aim to have the photos look as natural as possible. It’s one of the reasons that I usually prefer to work on location with kids. They can have fun playing in a park or another favourite location without being corralled into an artificial studio environment.

Sometimes when a client wants some studio style images we’ll start at the studio then move to a location later. Even then I like to keep the shots looking as natural as possible. I’m not a big fan of the white-background look that is so prevalent nowadays.

Annita came to the studio with her lovely children Lexie and Jake. We started by making some relaxed portraits on the studio floor just using natural light before moving to a local park to finish the shoot.  They aren’t due to come back to see their pictures for a few more days but I can’t resist sharing a few here.  Hope you like them.

Family friend Alice came along too. Here’s a portrait of her, taken on location:

This shoot was organised by Evonne and Emma as a birthday present for Mo.  So we made a day of it with a location photo shoot that started late morning, a buffet lunch back here at the studio then back out on location for some more photos. It was the first time I’d seen everyone together since Evonne and Alex’s wedding in 2007 so it was great to meet everyone again. It was also great to see Kaian again and to see how he’s changed since we photographed him at a few weeks old.

It was a great fun shoot and a great jet lag antitdote   Here’s a selection of our favourites.

Last month I had the privilege of photographing Jon and Karin and their lovely family of five kids (and two dogs).  My approach to keeping that many kids amused is to get them involved in the shoot to make it exciting.  So we had great fun together exploring their garden looking for interesting places to take pictures.  We were spoilt for choice for brilliant locations and the kids were fantastic.  There’s too many great pictures to show individual pictures of everyone on the blog (sorry guys) but here are a few of my favourites.