Generational Family Pictures

If you are like me, you have arranged your own family pictures countless times but have you ever considered arranging a photo shoot for your extended family? For my parent’s 40th wedding anniversary last year, we arranged a photo shoot with my four brothers, our kids and our parents. My mom absolutely loved it! Daniel’s mother saw the pictures and asked if I would arrange one for her side of the family as well! I promised her for her birthday last February we would make it happen but it almost took an entire year to actually bring it to fruition! We tried back in June but only the grandkids were in the pictures and it was wet and muggy out! Needless to say, we were not super happy with the resulting images!

So when my brother and sister-in-law suggested getting together before our annual family Christmas party, we were all incredibly excited! We gave a very general color scheme and I think it came together beautifully! We met at Rivertown, which is a neighborhood right near us that has a park on the water and is the perfect place to take photographs! We have taken them there countless times! Our photographer, Grace, is a friend of my sister-in-laws and she did a fabulous job capturing personalities and perfect smiles!

Of course we had to include Carly, the family pet! She is the sweetest puppy and all the kids absolutely love her! Having her in the pictures made it a lot more fun for the kids! You will see in several images, we were able to get Crew to laugh and smile a lot more than he usually does because he was playing with Carly!

We made sure to get pictures of each individual family, each grandchild with grandparents and grandmother, the siblings, siblings with spouses, plus ones of each couple, including my in-laws. Creating a checklist before we started made it much easier to make sure we captured all the images we wanted.

We also made sure to make it very low pressure and fun! We were able to capture everyone interacting and just having fun together! This really captured personalities and real smiles!

I know these will be pictures our family, especially my mother-in-law will cherish forever! I am so grateful we did not give up but kept trying until we were able to get everyone together on a beautiful day to create the images we wanted! I would really encourage you to set something like this up for your own extended family! I will not say it was completely stress free, but it was totally worth it!