December Family Photos: Planning Your Year-End Portrait Session

December is, in my calendar, simultaneously one of the busiest and one of the most rewarding months for family photography. The natural endpoint of the year, the proximity of Christmas, and a general desire to have current family portraits all combine to create a concentrated wave of demand across November and December. This guide covers how I plan a December family session properly — timing, locations, conditions, and the particular quirks this time of year brings with it.

Early December Beats Late December

The first and the twentieth of December are, photographically, very different days in England. By the winter solstice on the 21st, usable outdoor light runs from roughly ten in the morning to three in the afternoon — about five hours in total. In early December that window is still extending by another twenty to forty minutes each afternoon, which makes a genuine practical difference to how much flexibility I have on the day.

There is a more practical reason too. Families who try to book portrait sessions in the second half of December generally find photographers already booked solid, and Christmas commitments creating scheduling conflicts from every direction. The sweet spot, in my experience, is the first two to three weeks of the month — enough time to use the resulting images for last-minute card orders, and considerably more manageable logistically than trying to squeeze a session in the week before Christmas itself.

What a December Outdoor Session Looks Like

December outdoor sessions in England have a particular visual character all their own — bare branches against a clear or overcast sky, frost on the grass in the mornings, and that specific quality of low winter light arriving at a wide angle across the landscape. These images look nothing like the spring or autumn sessions that fill most family portrait galleries, and for a number of families, that distinctiveness is precisely what they are after.

Frost in particular transforms a session completely. A clear, cold December morning with frost across every surface produces a visual quality that is genuinely striking — the grass turned crystalline and white, breath visible in the cold air, the whole landscape simplified almost to monochrome. These are images with an immediately recognisable character that most family portrait galleries simply do not have.

Capturing it properly requires a bit of planning around the weather rather than a fixed diary date — I watch forecasts for cold, clear nights, and I am generally happy to confirm or move a session at fairly short notice to take advantage of frost conditions the following morning if that is what a family is hoping for.

Indoor and At-Home Sessions

December is when indoor sessions feel most natural and most appealing to me as a photographer. The contrast between the cold outside and the warmth within, the domestic decorations and fairy lights of a Christmas interior, children genuinely excited about the approaching holiday — all of this is the natural environment for a cosy, relaxed indoor session.

A session at home in December, photographed in a family's own decorated space with their actual Christmas tree, produces images with a specificity that no studio backdrop can replicate. The particular way lights are hung, the stockings by the fireplace, the general lovely mess of the season — these details are entirely particular to one family in one year, and in twenty years they will feel invaluable in a way that is hard to appreciate fully at the time.

What to Wear

For outdoor December sessions, layering is essential, and I always suggest families overdress on arrival — wool coats, knitwear, warm base layers — then remove the outer layers just for the portraits themselves. A short outdoor session of forty-five minutes to an hour is entirely manageable even in genuinely cold December conditions, provided everyone stays properly warm between setups rather than standing around shivering.

Colour-wise, December portraits suit richer, deeper tones particularly well — burgundy, forest green, navy, deep red, warm cream. These photograph beautifully against both the pale winter landscape outdoors and any decorative elements present in an indoor session at home.

Choosing a Location in December

Cambridge and the surrounding countryside both offer good options for December sessions, though I choose differently depending on the light forecast. On a clear day, open parkland or a wide field with low winter sun gives the strongest results — the light travels almost horizontally, wrapping around a subject rather than falling straight down as it does in summer. On an overcast day, I lean toward locations with some structure — a walled garden, an avenue of bare trees, an old brick building — since flat winter cloud on its own can leave a wide-open field looking a little featureless.

Woodland is worth a specific mention in December. Bare branch structures against a pale winter sky have a graphic, almost architectural quality that is completely different from the same woodland in leaf, and a number of families specifically request it for that reason once they have seen the difference in a previous year's gallery.

The Week Between Christmas and New Year

Sessions in the final week of December — between Christmas and New Year — are unusual, and I would genuinely encourage families to consider them. Demand is very low, popular locations are largely empty, and families tend to be relaxed and in a distinctly different mood to the usual pre-Christmas rush. The weather in England during that week varies enormously, but it sometimes produces the clearest, coldest, most atmospherically distinct days of the whole winter.

For families with no fixed deadline for cards or gifts, and a bit of flexibility in their photographer's diary, this week can produce some of the most distinctive images of the entire year — a session unlike anything else in the gallery, simply because so few families think to book one at that particular point in the calendar.