Isabelle Portrait Photography Session Preston

The Preston portrait photographer who came in from the cold…

Cold can be good. The crisp, clean air and the light of winter gives real oomph (technical term, there) to portrait shots. The flipside is that your fingers can become so cold you can barely press the shutter button.

But enough of my woes – not least because little Isabelle put me to shame, braving the 1°C (-3° with wind chill) with a red nose and a smile. This was family portrait photography that should have been held in pre-Easter sunlight. But the relentless cold wasn’t enough to stop Isabelle and her family, as we headed to the water’s edge of Brockholes Nature Reserve for these shots.

There’s something about woolly hats, warm coats and wind chill that takes all pretence out of portrait photography. It has to be natural and unforced because, in such conditions, it can’t be anything else. The bleak scrubland and wooden decking of the visitor centre pontoons keeps the focus squarely on the family, and helps lend the images a wistful, almost Scandinavian quality.

And then, of course, there’s Isabelle. When you’ve got a model like her, family portrait photography is a real joy. What a star.