Outtakes

I love, love, love having the end product of family pictures but I absolutely despise the process of producing them from start to finish.  First you have to find time in the ridiculous family schedule.  Once you pick a date, you then have to determine what time of day will produce the least number of meltdown victims.  Next, you need to choose family outfits and convince each individual to actually wear them instead of their usual unique style.  Once we load all our people into the car to embark on the journey of said family portraits, we then begin the process of bribing them for good behavior.  Okay good, now we have everyone agreeing to listen and smile politely for the photographer.

We get out of the car and enter the studio.  And this is when all hell breaks loose.  Photo props are being used as imitation weapons, furniture is being used as jungle gym equipment, bows are being ripped out of hair, snacks are being smeared on shirts, etc., etc., etc.

We remind everyone of the promises they made in the car and they straighten up a little and get in front of the camera.   And then 30 seconds later,  one small being decides that nope, not today, I'm not going to cooperate!  She proceeds to play with toys outside of camera range while the rest of us stand their smiling like clowns waiting for the disobliging one to buckle under peer pressure and join us.  And because she doesn't buckle, we physically grab her and force her to join the picture.  This tactic produces beautiful pictures, let me tell you.  Now we have one crying child, one who is hungry, and another who needs to use the bathroom.   And we've only been here for 15 minutes at this point.  This sort of scenario continues for the next 30 minutes at which point we are all just done.  We apologize profusely to the photographer and load everyone back in the car and promise ourselves we will never do this again.  Until next year.

Oh, I forgot about the part where I then have to go through all the proofs and decided which of the very few decent pictures I want to choose.

In the end, we did get some great pictures and I really do love having them.  The good pictures are truly priceless, I just wish the painful.

Here are some of the pictures where you can see someone wasn't in the right spot or happy: