Extended Family Portrait Sessions: Planning a Multi-Generation Shoot

The last extended family portrait I did before the matriarch of that family passed away was taken eleven months before she died.

She was eighty-three. The family had been talking about doing it for two years. Scheduling kept getting in the way — someone was always traveling, the cousins had conflicting sports schedules, someone’s baby was too young or too fussy. The usual reasons.

Then one October they stopped waiting for a perfect window and picked a weekend when most people could be there. Twenty-two people in my studio. Four generations. The youngest was four months old. The oldest was the grandmother, who sat in the center of the group photograph in a blue dress she’d bought specifically for the occasion.

Eleven months later she was gone.

That photograph now hangs in five different homes. I know, because three of her children have told me. It’s the only image where all four generations are in the same frame, where she is present and visible and herself.

If you’re thinking about an extended family session and you have an older family member whose health has started to feel precarious — stop thinking about it. Call me. This is exactly what I mean when I say the right time is almost always sooner than you think.

Why Extended Sessions Are a Different Kind of Project

I want to be honest with you about something: an extended family portrait session requires more planning than any other kind of session I do. It’s not harder photographically — it’s harder logistically. And the logistics, if not handled well in advance, become my problem and yours the day of the session.

Twenty people who don’t all agree on what to wear. A toddler whose nap falls right in the middle of the scheduled time. Two branches of the family that have a complicated relationship and don’t know how to stand next to each other. A grandfather who moves slowly and needs extra time between setups.

None of these things are problems I haven’t handled. But they’re much easier to handle when we’ve talked through them beforehand, when the family has a plan, and when everyone knows what to expect.

The planning is part of the session. It starts the moment you call.

Designating One Point of Contact

This is the single most important logistical decision you’ll make, and most families don’t make it consciously.

Someone needs to own this project. One person who communicates with me, collects clothing information from all the branches of the family, manages the schedule, and is empowered to make decisions when there’s a conflict.

In my experience, this is usually the person who called me in the first place. Sometimes it’s the family member who lives closest to Eden Prairie and can be the logistics hub. Occasionally it’s someone who just has that organizational gene.

Without a point of contact, the planning conversations happen with five different family members who have five different pieces of information and no one is coordinating them. I’ve worked in that environment. It’s manageable, but it’s slower and more stressful than it needs to be.

Pick your person. Tell everyone else to go through them.

Clothing Coordination Across Multiple Households

The clothing question is where extended family sessions most often go sideways.

With a nuclear family, coordination is relatively simple — one household, one conversation, one set of decisions. With three or four family branches arriving from different houses, possibly different cities, you’re coordinating wardrobes across people who have different style sensibilities, different body types, and different levels of investment in the outcome.

My guidance: pick a palette, not an outfit. Give everyone the same two or three colors to work within and let them choose their own clothing. Navy and white. Earth tones with an accent of burgundy. Soft neutrals. Whatever fits the family’s aesthetic.

This approach works for three reasons. First, it’s achievable — you’re not asking Aunt Carol to wear something she doesn’t own. Second, it reads cohesively in photographs without looking like everyone is wearing a uniform. Third, it reduces the advance coordination to a single simple instruction.

Send a color swatch photo to each household. Ask people to confirm what they’re wearing two weeks before. Not the day before — two weeks, so there’s time to address any problems.

I’ve written more about clothing choices in my guide to what to wear for family portraits, which covers general principles that apply here even when the group is large.

Scheduling for the Oldest and the Youngest

The two people whose needs should anchor your scheduling decisions are the oldest adult and the youngest child in the session.

With older family members, the question is energy level across the day. I photograph a lot of families in the Edina and Wayzata area where grandparents are active and healthy well into their eighties — but active and healthy doesn’t mean inexhaustible. Afternoon sessions that extend into early evening can be too long. Morning sessions, when everyone is fresh, tend to work best for multi-generation groups. For everything specific to photographing grandparents well, I’ve written a dedicated guide to including grandparents in family portrait sessions.

With young children, the same nap-and-hunger logic applies as in any family session: schedule around their rhythms, feed everyone before you arrive, and don’t expect a two-year-old to be cooperative for three hours just because the occasion is important. My guide to preparing kids for a family portrait session covers the details — everything there applies in a large group setting, just multiplied.

The Sequence That Works Best

For an extended family session, I work from largest grouping to smallest.

We start with the full group — everyone together, the photograph that’s most logistically complex and most emotionally significant. Getting this image first, before anyone is tired or restless, before the toddler has hit the wall, is almost always the right call.

From there we work down: each nuclear family unit, then grandparents with grandchildren, then siblings together, then individual portraits if the family wants them. By the time we’re doing individual portraits, the full group image is already locked and the pressure is off.

This sequence also means that if something does go sideways — if a child needs a break, if Grandma needs to sit down, if a branch of the family needs to leave early — we already have the most important photograph. Everything else is bonus.

What Makes These Sessions Worth the Effort

I want to say this plainly, because I sometimes sense that families treat the extended session as an obligation — something they’ll do once to appease the grandparents and then be done with.

The families who plan these sessions thoughtfully and come back to do them again — and I have families who have done this with me across twenty and thirty years — tell me the same thing: the photograph changes. It becomes more valuable with time, not less.

The children in the first one grow up. New children appear. Grandparents who were in the early ones are gone from the later ones, and their absence in the frame makes the images where they were present something irreplaceable. That photograph, once you have it, deserves to be printed large. I’ve written about why printed family portraits outlast digital files — and about where to hang a family portrait so it actually lives with you rather than sitting in a drawer.

Multi-generation family portraits are not a one-time project. They’re the beginning of a record. The family that comes in every five years is building something that will genuinely matter to people who haven’t been born yet.

That’s not a small thing.

Related Reading:

• How to Include Grandparents in Family Portraits
• Preparing Kids for a Family Portrait Session Without the Meltdown
• Why Digital Files Aren’t Enough: The Case for Printed Family Portraits

When you’re ready to schedule, you can reach us directly at dalestudios.com/contact-us or call (952) 400-1020. Extended sessions book out quickly — don’t wait until everyone is already scheduled before you call.

If you’ve been meaning to make this appointment and haven’t, this is the part where I’d say: give me a call. Not to book anything — just to talk through what you’re thinking. I’m at (952) 400-1020, and I pick up.