We had planned for a couple of weeks to do this family portrait of five children out on the beach, but with the unpredictable weather we decided the night before to play safe and go for studio shots.

This turned out to be a great way of doing it because we effectively had two shoots going on at the same time: When the 1-year old felt like co-operating we could do pictures of the whole group, and while he had better things to do elsewhere we could get on with pictures of the older kids. This broke things up nicely and the 3-hour shoot breezed past without anyone getting bored. (These pics aren't in order and I bet you can't tell which ones were done at the end of the shoot.)

The 4th pic, with the girl touching the boy's head, was a candid moment between set-ups, not posed. Not surprisingly that's the shot that got the most "awww!" noises from the parents and grandparents when they saw it. Sweet, eh?
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Lighting info:

I changed my usual studio set-up for these shots. Normally I shoot with one softbox to camera left, up high, pointing down. This time I had the softbox at adult head height, pointed directly at the upright of the background. This created a fairly even field of light from front to back so the kids didn't have to be exactly in the right position. I also put a very low-power strobe with silver brolly over to camera right, about 3 f-stops darker than the main light. That little bit of fill kept everything bright and clean to achieve the (sort of) high-key look we wanted. I think I'll go back to using a fill light for all studio shoots from now on.