Pop-up portrait sessions with Gemma Griffiths Photography
The main bulk of my work is photographing families on location in the beautiful countryside of the Vale of Glamorgan but a few times a year I offer pop-up photo sessions at local playgroups or seasonal mini sessions. This year, I changed the way that I work a little bit. I have experience as a headshot and school portrait photographer so I used the same methods to take portraits of little ones at their toddler groups. I used to aim for around 4-6 images per child and always try and make sure that I had the ‘eye contact’ shot and focussed on producing a few head and shoulder portraits for parents to choose from.
This year after a fab training session and some market research amongst my clients I discovered that parents didn’t just want the head and shoulder portrait. They actually wanted a mixture of posed and unposed shots. They wanted images to show off their child’s personality and the environment they are in. Well, this was music to my ears because I’ve always preferred unposed and natural images, so I decided to experiment with my Spring toddler groups and tried to capture more than just a portrait.
The response has been awesome from parents. I’ve presented between 10-30 images to families with a variety of posed and unposed images. Images that have more authenticity than a ‘say cheese’ picture and it feels brilliant!
At these toddler sessions I only have 10 minutes per child, so most of the images have been taken in the same spot. I wanted to show you an example of some of the images from this little girls gallery – she had 33 images in total and I’ve only shared 16 here. As you can see, you can get a gorgeous set of images in a short space of time. You can see her cheeky little grin, her thoughtful moments and a little bit of sass thrown in for good measure. The session took place at the Colwinston Baby & Toddler group which is held in the village hall in Colwinston, just outside Cowbridge. The garden behind the hall has a carpet of wild forget-me-nots at this time of year and they provide such a lovely backdrop to my Spring portraits here.
If you run or attend a local playgroup and would like me to visit for a pop-up portrait session then please get in touch to let me know. You can also keep in touch by following my Facebook page. I’ll add new events as they get scheduled throughout the year.
If you have a group of friends or family members that are interested in a photo session then there is also the option of booking a private Group Mini Session for you all. Group Mini Sessions are a longer than my pop-up sessions and can include whole families, friendship groups and cousins etc. You can find out all about the idea behind my Group Mini Sessions on my blog.
Gem x
