Family · Tryall Club · Jamaica
A family session at
Tryall Club, Jamaica.
Anjali and her family came to Tryall Club for the week. Three generations, two small girls, and a set of locations on the property that I do not get to use with every family. The lawns, the great house water wheel ruin, the fairway, and the beach. This is what the afternoon looked like.
The full family
Six people, one frame.
A three generation family portrait is one of the more complex things to organise on location. The ages span too wide for everyone to hold still for long, and the energy in the group is different from a couple or a small family of four. The key is to keep it moving and take the portrait quickly while the light is good and the little ones are still cooperative.
The Tryall lawns gave us an open, clean background with the palms and a frangipani tree behind. Everyone was in good form.
The grandparents
Two people laughing on the grass.
I always try to pull the grandparents aside for a portrait on their own. It is the photograph they will not think to ask for and the one that tends to matter most to the whole family years later. The laugh in this frame arrived without any prompting.
Tryall Club has a set of locations that no other property in Jamaica can offer. The great house water wheel ruin alone is worth planning a session around.
The water wheel
The ruin that makes this property different.
The great house water wheel at Tryall is an eighteenth century sugar mill ruin. The iron wheel is still intact, set against a limestone and brick wall with tropical forest climbing up behind it. There is no equivalent anywhere else in Montego Bay for a family photograph. The scale of it, the age of it, and the texture of the stone give images from this location a quality that is completely unlike anything produced on a manicured resort lawn.
We photographed the full group in front of the wheel, then stepped back for the girls on their own. The older sister wrapped her arms around the younger one and that was the frame.
The fairway
Walking across open ground.
The Tryall golf course gives access to stretches of open, well kept grass that work perfectly for walking shots. The mountain range behind and the palms on either side frame the scene without requiring any specific positioning from the family. You walk, I follow.
The full group held hands across the fairway and the little ones ran. These are the photographs that look like nobody was directing anything, because nobody was.
The beach
Where the afternoon ended.
The Tryall beach is calm and wide. We moved there for the last portion of the session, which is where the more relaxed, unscripted images tend to come from. The family portrait with the palm and the sea behind works cleanly. The grandparents portrait by the infinity pool has a stillness to it that the earlier lawn portraits do not.
Then the grandfather walked the younger girl into the waves, shoes and all. And the mother bent down to kiss the older one on the sand. Those two frames are the ones that close the set.
Booking a session here
What to know about Tryall Club.
Tryall Club is one of the three properties in Jamaica where I am a recommended photographer with no vendor fee. The water wheel ruin, the fairway, the great house gardens, and the beach give a family session more location variety than almost anywhere else on the island. Knowing the grounds and how the light moves across them through the afternoon is where the planning for a session like this starts.
If your family is staying at Tryall Club or anywhere else in Jamaica, get in touch and we can talk through what a session would look like for your group.