Birrell Signature Photography Inc - Families Dressing A Group

When striving to create a successful family portrait, the efforts to achieve harmony in clothing will pay the biggest dividends in the quality of your finished portraits. Here are our recommendations:

Choose SOLID COLORED, non-trendy clothing. Small patterns of muted or harmonious colors work well too.

Keep the TONAL RANGE (lightness or darkness) consistent throughout the group. Choose either medium to light tones, or medium to dark tones, for all the people in the group. If you have 9 people wearing dark colors and one person dresses in white, guess where the eye will go.

It's also important to try to achieve COLOR HARMONY in the portrait. The same rule applies to choice of colors - if everyone is in cool colors and one person is in orange, they will get all the visual attention. The best choices for colors are neutral to cool colors (blues, grays, greens, browns, earthy colors, etc.) & to try to avoid "hot" colors such as red, orange, mustard, etc. These are guidelines only - an entire family dressed in Husker red can look very good. You know what colors flatter your family!

Clothing STYLE should also be considered. A group dressed in formal clothes with one person in blue jeans may not be as successful.

LONG SLEEVES, weather permitting, are a better choice than short sleeves or sleeveless as bare arms detract from faces.

Some poses will show your shoes so don't forget to consider your SHOES & SOCKS when selecting outfits to wear.

JEWELRY - Keep it simple