The Photographs You’ll Care About Most (Aren’t the Ones You Think)
By ANDREA WHELAN – a London Family Photographer Who Truly Gets Families
When families get their gallery back from me, the photograph they love most is almost never the one they expected.
It’s not the one where everyone’s looking at the camera. It’s not the beautifully composed wide shot with the park behind them, even though that one usually looks gorgeous. The image that stops people, the one they message me about late at night, the one that makes them cry, is almost always something quieter. A hand on the back of a child’s head. A look between two people who’ve forgotten I’m there. A child mid-run back towards a parent, arms out, not because anyone asked them to but because they just wanted to be close.
Those moments last two seconds in real life. They happen in the gaps between everything else. And they’re what I’m actually photographing, even when it looks like I’m photographing something else entirely.
What I mean by “in-between”
I don’t mean candid in the way people usually use that word, as if I’m hiding behind a bush with a long lens, catching you unawares. It’s not surveillance. It’s attention.
The in-between is what happens when nobody’s trying. The moment after a posed shot (there will be some of those), when everyone exhales and turns towards each other and becomes themselves again. The ten seconds between one activity and the next, where a child drifts back to a parent just because they want to be close. The look that passes between two people who have a whole private conversation in a single glance.
It’s the stuff that happens when the performance stops. And in my experience, (I’ve photographed over 1000 families since 2011) that’s where everything good lives.
Why most family photos miss it
Most traditional family photography is built around the opposite idea. It’s built around the peak moment: everyone looking, everyone smiling, everyone in the right position. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting that, I strive for and deliver those images too, I also make sure they’re beautiful.
But if that’s all you get, you’re missing the thing that actually makes your family yours. Because every family can stand in a line and smile. Not every family has that specific thing where your son puts his hand on your face when he’s talking to you, or your daughter does that particular run where her arms go everywhere, or you and your partner do that look when one of the children says something accidentally hilarious.
Those details are so ordinary to you that you probably don’t even notice them anymore. But they’re the first things that will disappear as your children grow. And they’re the things I’m trained, both professionally and temperamentally, to see.
I’m sensitive to the small shifts. The moment someone tips from relaxed into self-conscious. The moment a child who’s been cautious finally lets go. The exact instant when a whole family is genuinely absorbed in each other rather than aware of me. That sensitivity is probably the most useful thing I bring to a session.
How I actually get these moments
It’s not luck and it’s not because I have a good camera. It’s environment.
The reason I spend the first few minutes of every session just being present, watching, chatting, following the children’s lead, not reaching for my camera too quickly, is because I’m building the conditions for the in-between to happen. If people are nervous, performing, or trying to get it right, the in-between doesn’t exist. There’s no gap between one performance and the next.
When people feel safe, when the children are absorbed in something and the parents have genuinely forgotten I’m there, that’s when the thread between them becomes visible. The reaching. The pulling close. The way someone turns towards another person with real tenderness rather than camera-awareness.
I’ve learned to recognise it the moment it appears. And I’ve learned to photograph it without breaking it, which means being quick, being quiet, and knowing when to step back entirely.
Some of this is technical skill. Knowing how to work with natural light, how to compose quickly, how to be in the right place before the moment happens rather than chasing it after. But a lot of it is just paying very close attention to people. Noticing what’s actually happening rather than what’s supposed to be happening.
The ones that get better with time
Here’s something I’ve noticed about the in-between photographs: they age differently.
The perfectly posed group shot looks the same in ten years as it does today. Nice. Familiar. You glance at it and you know exactly what it is.
But the in-between photographs, the hand on the back of the head, the mid-laugh, the moment someone wasn’t ready, those ones change meaning over time. They become more important, not less. Because what they’re preserving isn’t how you looked. It’s how you were with each other. The dynamic, the tenderness, the particular chaos of this exact phase of family life.
Your children probably won’t remember the afternoon I photographed them. But when they look at those images in twenty years, they’ll see something they can’t get any other way: proof of the ordinary, extraordinary way you loved them. Not the highlight reel. The real thing.
And the real thing, it turns out, is always in the in-between.
What this looks like in practice
My sessions are long enough, around 90 minutes to two hours, for the performing to wear off and the real life to take over. I work across London, at home and outdoors, in Greenwich, Blackheath, Dulwich, Marylebone, Mayfair, parks, kitchens, wherever your family is most themselves.
I’ll gently guide you when it helps. I’ll step back when it doesn’t. And I’ll be watching the gaps, the spaces between the big moments, because that’s where your family actually lives.
If you want photographs that feel like your real life rather than a version of it tidied up for someone else’s benefit, I think we’ll get on well.
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