A local photography company is offering a fresh take on family photos. The Little Things is owned and operated by Kayla Hoskins from Niverville, although she offers her services to clients in a broad region throughout Winnipeg and the rural southeast.
“My company specializes in capturing everyday family moments and memories through photography and short films,” Hoskins says. “Particularly, my style is referred to as documentary, meaning that unlike traditional family photography, where the parents get everyone dressed up and the backdrop is set at a park or location that is unfamiliar to the family, I photograph and film families doing everyday things and activities in environments they are familiar with.”
Hoskins often sets sessions in a family’s own home, a place where parents and kids are comfortable and at their most natural.
“I may be documenting what the family’s morning looks like—waking up, brushing teeth, making breakfast, etc.,” she says. “It can include indoor/outdoor playtime, games, activities, walking to the local park, going for ice cream, or attending dance class. During the change of seasons, popular session activities include decorating the Christmas tree, baking cookies, picking a pumpkin and decorating it for example.”
She says the most important aspect of her service is that every session is customized to the individual family. “None of my sessions look the same. My clients know that their kids are growing so fast that they can’t keep up, and they want to capture what their life looks like right now.”
Hoskins, who has always harboured an interest in photography, started The Little Things two years ago. She says that it grew out of the fact that she doesn’t have the greatest memory and often tries to document her own memories by taking pictures.
“People saw my work and became interested and started asking me if I could photograph their families,” she says of her transition from amateur to professional photographer. At the beginning, she mostly stuck to the tried-and-true approach of posing families and asking them to smile a lot. “I found after a while that this style didn’t really work for me, and I realized that I didn’t like asking people, particularly kids, to smile, behave, and look at the camera. So I started experimenting with my style. I wanted to create photography that wasn’t just ‘pretty’ but more importantly was significant, meaningful, and enjoyable to the families I was working with.”
Hoskins began seeking more feedback from her clients about what was important to them—how they spent most of their time, what they most wanted to remember about that particular period in their lives. Armed with this feedback, she began directing her photography to capture more emotional, compelling, and relevant snippets of real life.
Although The Little Things caters to families, Hoskins has also worked extensively with couples, weddings, and businesses. More recently, she has expanded to also produce short films. These films are very short indeed, about two to four minutes long.
“I think people primarily think of films for the really big events in their lives,” Hoskins says. “People are always looking for a videographer for weddings, for example. I think people forget about films for the little moments in life—until those moments have passed, when their kids have grown, and people look back and realize they wish they had more videos of their family growing up.”
She fondly recalls a favourite client session from last year, with a family with two young children. New to documentary photography, they wanted a photo session that captured their family celebrating Christmas together.
“After chatting with the parents about what they wanted to remember about this time, they decided they would like me to photograph them and the kids decorating the Christmas tree,” she remembers. “What I liked about it most was that the family got to spend time together doing something they do traditionally every year, and I was able to work behind the scenes to capture that moment for them.”
And that, she says, is the key to what she does: “The thing about documentary photography that I love is it changes how people view their everyday experiences, and allows them to find the beauty in that.”
