Families · Issue 5 · 6 min read
Island days with small children
Nobody photographs well at four in the afternoon in thirty-one degrees. A day built around that fact instead of against it.
Parents apologise to me more than any other kind of client. They apologise for the toddler who will not stand still, the six-year-old who has decided photographs are humiliating, the baby who needs feeding exactly when the light turns.
None of it needs apologising for. It needs a schedule built around a child rather than around an adult's idea of a nice photograph.
Go early, and go short
Children are at their best in the first two hours they are awake and their worst between three and five in the afternoon. That happens to line up perfectly with the light: sunrise is the kindest hour of the day here and the hour your children are most likely to cooperate.
Forty minutes is plenty. I have never had a family session improve after the first hour, and I have had many of them fall apart in the second.
Give them something to do
Standing in a line looking at a camera is a task with no reward. Running into the sea is a reward with no task. The second one photographs far better, and the children notice the difference immediately.
The best family frames I make are almost always a side effect of something the family were genuinely doing — a chase down the beach, a shoulder ride into the water, somebody being buried in sand.
Things that occupy a child on an island
Most resorts will arrange all of these, and most parents do not find out until day four.
- The kids' club, which on the bigger islands is genuinely excellent and free
- A glass-bottom boat — the pay-off of snorkelling without the mask negotiation
- Feeding the stingrays or reef sharks at the jetty, usually at dusk, always a highlight
- A sandbank trip with a packed lunch — an entire island with nothing dangerous on it
- Turtle and dolphin cruises, booked early in the week in case the weather moves them
On what to wear
Matching white outfits are the traditional answer and they do work. But sand, juice and seawater are also coming, so bring two sets of whatever you choose, and let the children be slightly less coordinated than the adults. Nobody looking at the photograph in ten years will be auditing the palette.
Written on an island, usually before breakfast.
Ibrahim Asad · Ask me about your week
