Gurock Family Portrait

This past week I had the pleasure of taking a portrait of the entire Gurock Family. When I moved to Passaic over 18 years ago they were one of the first families that I met. Their oldest son and I were in high school together and we shared a carpool for a couple of years. Those were the days.
With kids living out of state it's not often that they are all together and, regrettably I am only in touch with them via Facebook (it's a new fad, you should check it out). But this past Thanksgiving weekend I was excited by the chance to photograph them together and the resulting image is above.

Often when I am asked to take family pictures the goal is to get a variety of shots of the family sitting, posing, playing and just being themselves. The images from those sessions may each be beautiful independently but make a compelling story when told together either in an album, as a collage or just a series of framed pictures next to each other - check out these family portraits from a couple of summers ago. The Gurock's on the other hand wanted a single great shot of the entire family; anything else I could get (and I did take other pictures) was icing on the cake.

So my assistant Aryeh and I spend a short while scouting the best location and posing each of the subjects in the picture. The real work however, came in post production. As you can imagine getting 16 people to all look good in the same shot is nearly impossible. So I set my camera on a tripod and took four shots, making minor adjustments to the posing while doing my best to keep everyone engaged and smiling at the camera (when dealing with little kids that usually involves me making a fool of myself). Below you can see the four pictures next to each other along with the printout I used to markup which faces and body positions I wanted to use for the final image




It's a little hard to see in the smaller version here, but trust me, the subtle differences in expression of each person can make or break the picture (but sometimes that can add to the character of the shot as well). Notice how the guy sitting on the right side of the picture is slouching in the first shot, while the tall guy standing in the middle has his hand in his pocket for all the other shots. Things like that don't always matter as much as the two examples below. The three shots of the boy and the three shots of the girl are both chronological. While she is perfect in the first picture he takes a few tries to get comfortable. Kids will be kids.




Anyway, as you might have guessed it's very time consuming. Unless your group shot has more than a handful of people in it and your know you intend to make a large copy (this shot on canvas with some brush strokes would be really sweet) it's not necessary to go though all this trouble. Your family is perfect just the way they are!