Well, it’s been our pleasure over the past few years to help support one of the children’s groups in our village – Haddenham Puddleducks Playgroup – by holding an all-day session for families to come along and get a load of photos to help raise funds. Our youngest, Jake, went to Puddleducks and loved every second of it so I really can’t say enough about the job the guys do – absolutely awesome.

This is always a pretty hectic day as we limit each session to 15 minutes or so and endeavour to get as many images as we can in that time – pretty much a condensed version of our regular lifestyle session that would ordinarily last a couple of hours. We then split the profit with the group 50/50 helping raise funds AND providing a really popular event each year.

For this year’s session I was hoping to spend more time outdoors rather than shooting in a studio setup but, once again, the weather fairies had a slightly different view. So we photographed quite a few children in the rain (they weren’t worried in the slightest!).

As you can imagine, with 15 families in a day, we had a somewhat er.. lively day at the end of which we had captured an absolute wealth of images – and a not inconsiderable ache for Nurofen! Given it was the day after Sport Relief, it felt more like I’d been running in a marathon than taking photographs all day! However, it’s a fantastic day and we spent most of it laughing – working with children is always surprising, entertaining and hugely rewarding and this was no exception.

As always, it’s hard to choose the right images to put up on the blog and this session is particularly difficult as we have, for each family, a load we could use so – mostly in the interests of simplicity – we’ve opted to put up images of the Puddleducks committee and of one or two who are close to the group. (Admittedly, this also makes getting the necessary permissions that bit easier). Rest assured there are loads more we could have chosen!

Anyway, here are a few to give you a feel of what we got up to – enjoy!