For Christmas my brother and sister in law bought us a really lovely present – a voucher for a portrait shoot with our wedding Photographer, Chris Boland of Distant Cloud Photography. Hubs used to work with Chris many years ago and knew he was starting out as a photographer so it made sense to contact him for our wedding and we absolutely adored the photographs he took of our big day. We had a shoot with him when Monkey was tiny and so were very excited to have another photo shoot with him now we are a family of four.

We always thought we would aim for the shoot to be in the summer but we didn’t plan on it being this late in the summer. We had to cancel the first date we planned due to all of the illness we have had this year, and we finally rebooked it recently. We nearly had to cancel again the day before when I bashed my face on the car – hitting myself right on the bridge of my nose and giving myself a minor black eye!! Blimmin typical on the day before a photoshoot but thankfully make-up managed to cover it and we kept the booking.

We went to our local country park and thankfully it was a lovely day, nice and sunny but not too too hot. I will be honest though, it really was hard work, Monkey was running riot or not wanting to smile or take off his sunglasses. Times when LM jus wanted to walk or was just fed up of being held in place so got really wriggly. I took a few outtake shots of the “behind the scenes” at the photoshoot.. oh the chaos.

But, thankfully Chris is brilliant and managed to get so many amazing shots of us all so it was very very very much worth it. I have popped a few below  (Seriously I don’t know how he does it, I do not look this nice normally!)

We are planning a photo wall with some of the shots and I can’t wait to put them up as they are just lovely. Really nice to get such great shots of the kids and some nice ones of us with them.

Have you had family photo shoots? Have you found them hard work too?