Helen Bartlett / Family Portraiture

A New Portrait to Echo an Old One

22Oct

A Tunnel of Trees and the Passage of Time

As regular readers and clients will know my favourite thing about this wonderful job is the friends I make and the relationships I build with clients over years.  It’s an incredible source of joy to me to visit families again and again and to watch children grow up and record their lives in pictures.  So, I was thrilled when I was booked to photograph Sophia again.  We first met when she was about four weeks old, back in 2007 and I’ve been lucky enough to photograph the family a number of times since then. Each shoot has been brilliant and over the years my sessions with Sophia have created some of my all-time favourite pictures as well as being fantastic fun.  It’s been a privilege to watch this intelligent and funny young lady grow up and I’m already looking forward to our next session, I’ve been told there will be a puppy too next time, I can’t wait.

As always with our sessions there are so many lovely pictures to choose from and so it’s hard narrowing it down to post a single image as a sneak preview but this shot caught my eye as it’s an image that directly references one that I have taken before.  Each shoot is unique, we always do different things, children grow, and their interests change. But sometimes I’s fun to go back to a similar place or pose to show progressions and the scale of change but also what remains the same in the places we go to and our homes that we love. This tunnel of trees will be standing in decades to come, it’s such a lovely thought.

So, today’s sneak preview is posted alongside an old shot, from 2013 shot in the same place.  Different light, different pose but so much to echo from one to the other.  I find combinations of pictures like this delightful and I hope you will enjoy seeing them together.