Behind the Lens

Some sessions are built around a milestone. Others are just a family, on an ordinary day, being themselves — and those are often the ones that produce the strongest gallery. Uday and Vandana’s session was the latter. Their son had opinions about everything, a full head of hair, and absolutely no interest in looking at the camera unless it suited him. Which made for an honest afternoon of photography.

We were working in a modern lounge setting — floor-to-ceiling windows, natural light coming in from one direction, a deep couch that gave us room to let the family settle into themselves. The approach with sessions like this is always the same: get the family comfortable, give the baby something to be interested in, and stay out of the way until the moment is there.

The baby was the center of gravity for everything — both parents orbiting around him, reacting to whatever he decided to do next. That’s the dynamic I try to photograph in family sessions: not the family performing togetherness for the camera, but the actual texture of how they move together. The small adjustments, the half-laughs, the moments where both parents are focused on their kid and have forgotten I’m in the room.

He had a can he’d claimed as his for the afternoon. Held it, inspected it, offered it, took it back. Somewhere in the middle of all of that was a full gallery of portraits — his expressions alone could carry a session.

The baby solo portraits are a separate exercise entirely. Getting a sitting infant to hold still long enough to compose a clean frame requires patience and good timing more than anything else — the window is narrow and the expression you’re after usually appears for about half a second. The light from the windows gave us a clean, airy look for these frames that contrasted nicely with the warmer family shots.

We finished with the black and white frames — the close-up between dad and son, the kind of image that bypasses everything else in a gallery and just sits with you. Conversion to monochrome on the right frame isn’t a stylistic choice, it’s a tonal one — it removes everything that isn’t about the people.

What I take away from sessions like this one is a reminder of what family photography is actually for. Not the perfect image — though those happen — but the accumulation of honest ones. The ones where the parents are looking at their kid and you can read everything in their faces. The ones where the baby is just being a baby, loud and curious and completely unimpressed by the process.

Congratulations to Uday, Vandana, and their son — it was a pleasure documenting this season of your family.

Family Photography · Brampton & GTA

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