Go beyond the birthday snapshot and learn how to take inspired and unposed family photographs that capture the ages and stages of family life. Real Life Family Photography puts an end to awkward family photos, encouraging you to take inspiration from the every day details, while offering tips on fundamental techniques such as exposure, composition, lighting and focus. There's even advice on how to photograph babies and pets, giving you the knowledge and freedom you need to take unique, frame-worthy pictures.

From leading photography expert Me Ra Koh, "The Photo Mom," comes the book for parents with little to no photography experience who want to capture better portraits and photos of their families using any camera. What parent doesn’t want to capture the perfectly imperfect joy of family life through photos? From holidays and vacations to portraits and shared moments, celebrated photographer (and mom) Me Ra Koh not only helps moms and dads take better photos, but inspires them to discover photography as a way to connect with, cherish, and celebrate their family. With forty beautiful “photo recipes” anyone can follow—with any camera—preserving your family’s story has never been easier!

A beacon of creativity with boundless energy, Chase Jarvis is well known as a visionary photographer, director, and social artist. In The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You, Chase reimagines, examines, and redefines the intersection of art and popular culture through images shot with his iPhone. The pictures in the book, all taken with Chase’s iPhone, make up a visual notebook—a photographic journal—from the past year of his life. The book is full of visually-rich iPhone photos and peppered with inspiring anecdotes. Two megapixels at a time, these images have been gathered and bound into a book that represents a stake in the ground. With it, Chase underscores the idea that an image can come from any camera, even a mobile phone. As Chase writes, “Inherently, we all know that an image isn’t measured by its resolution, dynamic range, or anything technical. It’s measured by the simple—sometimes profound, other times absurd or humorous or whimsical—effect that it can have upon us. If you can see it, it can move you.” This book is geared to inspire everyone, regardless of their level of photography knowledge, that you can capture moments and share them with our friends, families, loved ones, or the world at the press of a button. Readers of The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You will also enjoy the iPhone application Chase Jarvis created in conjunction with this book, appropriately named Best Camera. Best Camera has a unique set of filters and effects that can be applied at the touch of a button. Stack them. Mix them. Remix them. Best Camera also allows you to share directly to a host of social marketing sites via www.thebestcamera.com, a new online community that allows you to contribution to a living, breathing gallery of the best iPhone photography from around the globe. Together, the book, app, and website, represent a first-of-its-kind ecosystem dedicated to encouraging creativity through picture taking with the camera that you already have. The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You—shoot!

An intimate, honest look at how we photograph our families through the lenses of some of the world’s great photographers People photograph their families more than ever before, whether casually, on a phone, or in a formal wedding portrait. This bold anthology explores how photographers around the world take on the emotional roller coaster and complex dynamics of family life. The book is divided into two parts: Our Own Families and Other People’s Families, focusing on photographers who make their own families their subjects and those who aim their lenses at other people’s. Each section includes an essay analyzing the complex attachments between brothers and sisters, parents and children, step-families and in-laws, outcasts and adoptees. The book includes the work of nearly forty international photographers, including sophisticated artworks in a range of photographic styles, and personal, never-before published shots. Birte Kaufman’s award-winning images of Irish travelers, Magnum member Trent Parke’s darkly amusing shots of his family in suburban Australia, Nadia Sablin’s elegy to her elderly aunts living in rural Russia, and Elina Brotherus’s devastatingrecords of failed IVF, are just a few of the astonishing visual journeys, supplemented by interviews with the artists, that push the boundaries of our understanding of family.

A photo-journey through the homes and lives of 30 families, revealing culture and economic levels around the world.

FAMILY – A small word with powerful meaning. Most of us trace the roots of our own personal identity back to our experience of being part of a family. The definition of what a family is can vary widely, but most family photography is anything but varied. We are used to the basic posing of a group, assembled and smiling like they never do in real life. This doesn't offer much visual or emotional impact. Create an image that captures the spirit of a family – as well as the individualism of the members – and you start at a magical place. That family now feels something when they view the photograph. In Tamara Lackey's Envisioning Family: A photographer's guide to making meaningful portraits of the modern family, Lackey reinvents the family photo for photographers. A top portrait photographer and sought-after speaker, Lackey reveals her techniques for getting each member of the family to feel at home in front of the camera – whether they're in her studio, at home, or on location. With this book you'll learn how to use backgrounds that complement your subjects, set up and shoot in-studio, light your images anywhere with straightforward lighting setups and diagrams, pose your subjects in a beautiful but natural way, nail your exposure, and create meaningful family portraits that leave everyone feeling and looking their honest best. For professional portrait photographers looking to inject some new vitality into their work or aspiring family photographers who would like to take more authentic images, this guide will help capture the modern family.

This National Book Award finalist is a revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder." In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.