More and more folks are homeschooling their children for a variety of reasons.  Regardless, the one benefit as a photographer I can see with homeschooling is avoiding Picture Day.  Now, I am not going to criticize the companies that do volume photography for schools and sports teams.  They fulfill a need for people to document their child’s advancement through the grades, from adorable pre-schooler, to gap-toothed tweener, to “when did they get so big they’re graduating high school!”  But volume photography does not lend itself to true portraits.  Your child gets less than a minute to get in place, give an automatic smile, and then it’s on to the next student in line. 

Last year I received a request to do a Picture Day for a Catholic homeschool collective in Chattanooga.  After some discussion, what we did was very simple:  a flat fee per family and they received edited digital files.  I did class pictures in front of their church’s altar and then set up a portable studio in an unused classroom.  I made sure the parents got to see sample pictures using the backdrop I would use before the session, so if they wanted to have their children dress a little more “nicely” knowing the output would be studio quality, they could plan for that.  The focus remained solely on sibling groups and individual poses.

And here are some of the results:

This is another example of my practice of Studio Anywhere.  In this case, the group did meet at parish offices every Friday so the children could have a day of lessons together.  An empty classroom became the studio when I brought in a backdrop and lighting, but this could just as easily have been in a family’s home.  If distance was not a problem, another option is to have Picture Day in my studio in Knoxville, as I have done before for a sports team.

The pictures were delivered via online galleries.  Each family had their own password protected gallery where they could view and download their pictures – very handy, too, for giving Grandma and Grandpa the link so they could do the same.  Printed products were available at an extra cost.

The fewer students in a homeschool group meant a little more time could be spent working with a child – and that meant more genuine expressions and posing!  If you are a homeschooling parent, chances are you belong to a group, formal or informal, who want portrait quality of their students once or twice a year.  Let’s talk about that!