The Portrait Experience at Yann Studios

A portrait session at Yann Studios is rarely the formal, slightly stiff affair people sometimes expect. We have had three generations to refine how a sitting flows, and the result is a process that feels calm and unhurried even when there is a houseful of children involved. This page is about what actually happens, from the first phone call through to the photograph that ends up on your wall.

Before the session

Every sitting starts with a conversation by phone, ten or fifteen minutes, usually a few weeks before the date. We use it to find out what you have in mind, who is going to be in the photographs, and what you are hoping to come away with. Plenty of clients are not sure what they want at this stage, and that is fine. We have enough experience to talk through the options and help you arrive at something that suits the family.

We will cover practical things on that call too. What everyone is going to wear, and which colours sit well together. The right time of day given the children’s ages. The setting you have in mind, since the studio handles most family sittings, but home and outdoor sessions around Galway are both options. And what you are likely to want with the finished work, since the answer often shapes how we approach the session itself.

The studio sitting

Most family sittings take place at our studio in Claregalway. The room is warm, properly heated, with no public foot traffic to think about and parking at the door. Plenty of parents tell us afterwards that the calm of the room itself was half the reason the children settled.

We do not line everyone up and bark instructions. The first ten or fifteen minutes are mostly about the children getting used to us and the room, and we will often get the best frames once everyone has forgotten the reason they came. With young families, the session follows the children’s energy rather than a fixed plan. With older families and couples, we work at the pace that suits the day.

Most sittings run between forty and ninety minutes. That sounds vague, but it depends entirely on who is in the room and how they are doing. We follow what is in front of us rather than the clock.

Seeing the photographs

A week or two after the sitting, we invite you back to the studio to see the photographs together. The images are shown at proper size on a screen rather than emailed as a gallery link, and this matters more than it sounds. A photograph that looks fine on a phone often looks remarkable when you see it at the size it is going to live at on a wall.

This viewing is also where we help you decide what is worth keeping in print. There is no pressure to order more than you want. We will tell you honestly which images will hold up at size and which ones to put away, and three generations of doing this has given us a reasonably good eye for that judgement.

The prints on the wall

A folder of digital files sitting on a hard drive is not the same as a portrait on your wall, and it never becomes one. Files get backed up, forgotten, and eventually lost to a dead laptop or a changed phone. A printed portrait gets looked at every day for years.

So we treat the prints, framed pieces and albums as the heart of the work rather than something tacked on at the end. The viewing is where we talk through what is worth framing, and what suits smaller prints or an album. Most clients come away with one larger framed piece for the wall and a few smaller items for around the house, but the exact mix is yours.