Caergwrle Castle Capers - Informal Family Portraiture

I had the pleasure, yesterday, of spending an afternoon photographing one of my best friends, and her lovely family. I've known Hazel and Mark for a long time, and have had the privileged and the pleasure of photographing both their engagement and wedding, and of doing a couple of studio shots featuring Hazel, the children - and Hazels' Dad, the Inimitable Dennis .  However, up until this shoot, I hadn't yet had the chance to do a family portraiture session for them - so I was thrilled when Hazel asked me if we could organise a photo session .  They particularly wanted to include another very important family member - Bernard, their dog :)

So, with by some miracle, the skies being blue and the sun shining, Hazel and Mark settled on Caergwrle Castle as their location of choice, and off we set .  One of the reasons I love to photograph this family is that the whole shoot was absolutely full of laughter - they are fantastically relaxed and warm people - and I think it shows :)  During the shoot, I wanted informal family groupings, individual shots of the children, Declan and Hannah, and just to try and catch the interaction between them all, to reflect how close they are - and how happy .

Hazel wanted a selection in both colour, and black and white

The nice thing about this location is the number of area's where you can set up a shot.

Declan - the Cool Dude !

I liked catching the kids just - well - being kids !  The tree's were irresistible from a climbing point of view

Even Bernard seems to be laughing in this shot

Declan being Action man !

Hannah invented a new game - it was called 'lets give Auntie Sue a heart attack by seeing how high we can climb!'

Bernard proved to be a very gorgeous 'model' .

As always, taking pictures of this gang was brilliant fun - this shoot was something we had talked about doing for a while, it was great to finally make it happen - and this is just a small selection of the 200 plus images I was able to give them . Huge thanks to Hazel, Mark ( or, The Stud, as he is known :) ), Declan, Hannah and Bernard - I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this afternoon, or how glad I am that you loved the photographs x