Something that has been stirring in me for quite sometime is to do a new style of family portraits. I want to create a fun piece of art that will truly depict a family’s personality. I chose the O’Brien family as my first subject for this project. We met them the very first night we moved to Tybee and we became fast friends. They have been such a special part of our time on Tybee and I really wanted to do a fun family portrait of them before they made their move to Pensacola as the Coast Guard wishes. As Mel and I collaborated over a few weeks on possibilities for locations, she had the idea to use their house after it was emptied. This clicked perfect with me. The day after the movers pulled away with the last of their stuff, we came and set up for this portrait. Using several lights, I shot each family member separately. We did learn a valuable lesson that day. Our original plan was to have Colin peeking out of a moving box. Right after Mel put the box together, he jumped in it and posed perfectly. Except, we were still assembling lights and camera equipment and was not ready for the shot. Once he knew that we wanted him in the box, he would have nothing to do with it.  So we opted for him playing battleship. What you don’t see in the final image is that to get him laughing and smiling, we had Mel was on the floor playing battle ship with him. See Behind the Scenes shots below! The only other thing that I wanted to add to this, but technically did not pull off, is that I wanted some motion blur with Riley zipping through the room on her roller blades. Overall I was happy with the final image for my first family portrait of this sort and I am itching to do the next one.  I have a few other families that I have in mind and have contacted for my next creative shoots and I can’t wait to show them to you!