How to Prepare Your Home for a Stress-Free Lifestyle Photo Shoot

A lifestyle photo shoot is a photo session that’s typically in your own home and that focuses on candid and authentic scenes from your family’s life together, and they’re popular for newborn photos. Whether you prefer a lifestyle photo shoot over a photo session at an outdoor location or at my Mercer Island studio is simply a matter of preference, but some clients do worry that it will be stressful to get their home ready for professional portraits. To ease your worries, here’s how to prepare for a stress-free photo shoot at your home.

Talk to Your Photographer About What Areas to Prepare

You don’t need to have your entire home spotless and camera-ready for a lifestyle photo shoot. Typically, I’ll take all of the portraits in one or two rooms of your home, based on the light that each room receives and how they fit the style or look you want for your photos.

So, before you give the whole house a deep clean, we’ll have a planning session to figure out where your photo shoot will be so you can prepare those areas alone. This also makes it easy because, when there are items that clutter up the shooting area, you don’t have to find a place to hide them away, you can just move them into a room we won’t be using.

Consider Having an Activity Ready

Depending on your photo session, you might want some photos of your family doing something together that you enjoy. Maybe you love to play board games together, toss around a football in the backyard, etc. We’ll chat about this in your planning session and what items you might want to have handy in case we choose to use them, so that you don’t have to dig them out of a closet during your session.

Have a Separate Space Available for Your Kids

For many types of photo shoots, your kids will be in many of the portraits but not all of them. If this will be the case for your photo session, choose a separate room where your kids can play and be comfortable during those shots. You can set it up in advance with toys they like, snacks, and so on. If your kids are young, you might also want to have a grandparent or sitter come over to keep an eye on the kids during those times when you’re in front of the camera and the kids are off on their own.

Don’t Forget the Yard

If we’re taking photos in front of a window where the camera might catch views of your yard, make sure to give the yard a tidying up too. That might mean picking up kids’ toys or moving them to a part of the yard where they won’t be in the shot, bringing cars and bikes into the garage, and so on. You don’t want to worry about pausing your photo shoot to run outside and move your little one’s tricycle!

A lifestyle photo shoot doesn’t have to be stressful, and it doesn’t have to include days of prep work either. Contact Jaimié Birtel Photography and let’s talk about how we can make your next photo shoot smooth and easy!