Caring, award-winning family portrait and lifestyle photographer, offering studio or location photography at an affordable price.
There’s a bunch of things to consider when choosing your photographer, and style is an important one of them.
Each photographer will have their own style both in capturing your images and in editing. In this blog, we’ll briefly explore our own and whether it’s right for you.
It’s very common for people to feel uncomfortable in front of the camera, particularly men who are more likely to find it all a bit cringe.
It can often feel like an unnatural experience, where you always need the picture-perfect smile and pose. This is likely to just leave you feeling and looking uncomfortable.
At The Whitley Captures, we work hard to make you feel as relaxed as possible. We use a Lifestyle approach to set up a casual scene, whether outdoors or in the studio, and then encourage you to interact with each other in a fun, everyday way in order to get a natural look.
I may give you a simple game to play, or activity to try, maybe ask funny questions, all in order to help you relax and smile naturally. There is little need to pose in a structured way, but there will be instances when I will get your attention for some eye contact with the camera.
You’ll notice in our portfolio that in our children and family photography, the subjects may not always be looking at the camera, or they may not be in a structured pose. But what you’re likely to see is that they all look happy, relaxed and connected to one another.
But, because we know that grandparents generally like a more traditional posed photo, we do still try to include a little bit of posed, usually near the end of the shoot when everyone is a bit more comfortable.
Editing is a silent aspect of photography, often unrealised by clients. But it would be extremely unusual for you to receive images from anyone that haven't been edited at least a little bit.
Some photographers may go for a vintage style look, others an ethereal feel. Maybe a photographer will Photoshop you onto a digital backdrop.
We try to keep our images as fresh and realistic as we can without going overboard and making anyone look unnatural. We’re really not the type of photographers to make you look unlike yourself, and that’s not a criticism of others’ style - it’s just not our own.
That doesn’t mean we can’t Photoshop blemishes or photobombers in the distance, but we won’t smooth you out so much you look like a Kardashian.
Your clothes can also impact on the style of your photos and we may recommend a certain colour pallet or things to avoid for a particular shoot. You can see our tips on how to make your clothes work for you over on this article.
There are some shoots when this doesn’t necessarily apply, baby and cake smashes for example, where both the subjects may be a little young to be following instructions and props are more heavily used.
For these kinds of shoots we still adopt a natural edit, but often the setup is completely out of the norm - although we have to admit that it would be nice if we could eat a cake to ourselves every day!
We also recognise that corporate images are more commonly required to be more professional and structured, and we adapt to the style that you’re looking for.
We hope that this brief explanation helps you understand our style of photography a little more as you make your decision over whether we are the photographers for you.
See more of our style over on our Portfolio page, or contact us to make an enquiry