As the years fly by the desire to capture life before it changes gets more urgent. Initially when you have a baby, time seems to stand still. Then, if you are lucky, number two makes his or her entrance, and you are caught up in a whirl wind of children's parties, childhood illness and the general young family baggage. You get the family photography done and distributed to the grandparents. Then with, in retrospect, no warning, the little demanding bundles of joy turn five. School and all its' accompanying challenges takes them over and starts the inevitable progression towards their ultimate independence from you and the core family unit. Then transition is accompanied by an amazing change in timescales. From this point on time appears to go into fast forward. The family portrait you carefully organized and budgeted for still proudly adorns both grand parents' mantel pieces. But now when you look at the family photography you go into denial. As a cruel reverse to the fictional character ‘Dorian Gray' the images in family photograph never change but the family members do. Sadly time is not so kind to the grown ups, whereas the children are blossoming into a handsome, large, young man and beautiful blonde young woman, mum and dad are moving more of less resignedly into middle age! In the family photograph you remain for ever 30 something, if only you could capture your bodies aging process so permanently.

After the hundredth subtle comment regarding the family photograph and it's disparity from actuality, my mother in law breaks and asks out right, would I get a new family portrait done, please! Ok a new family photograph it must be. I then looked around locally, Hertfordshire, and via the internet to find the photographer who could best captured what I wanted to portray in our up to date family portrait. The photographer I chose turned out to be Hertfordshire base. This photographer had actually taken a baby portrait of my daughter for her first birthday. She'd just started walking, I remember propping her up against a sofa and scurrying out of the shot, full of anxiety that she might fall over. Anyway, the modern style and professionalism demonstrated then was still evident to this day and so I decided to use the same photographer again.

The family photography both mothers' had been complaining about was never a great success. I'd made use of a special offer to use the school photographer for the family photograph and it was alright, but nothing special! I was determined to be more careful this time and do my homework. With the growth of digital photography and display of photographic work online, the research process proved to be easy. Well designed studio photography websites have samples of their family photography for the customer to parse at their leisure. They also give the potential customer the ability to get a good idea of pricing not just of the initial sitting, but most importantly, how much the actual finished family photograph will cost.

Having made all these calculations, I still settled for the Hertfordshire based family photographer that I'd used to photograph my daughter. The final result the new family photograph, now has pride of place on both grandma's mantles', along side the initial family photograph. It rather begs the question, how many more family photographs will these mantles bear?