A family portrait in Belgrave with Five Castles Portraits isn't a single appointment, it's three. You start with a consultation at our gallery, move to a session built around your children's real rhythm rather than a fixed formula, and finish with a design appointment where you choose the pieces that will end up on your walls. Nothing about the process is rushed, and by the time you're collecting finished artwork, every decision along the way has already been made calmly, in person, with plenty of time to think.
Meeting one: the consultation
Before a single portrait is taken, you'll spend an hour with Arek at the gallery on Park Drive in Belgrave. This meeting is by appointment only, one family at a time, and it does three jobs at once. You'll see and hold actual finished artwork, canvas, framed prints, the pages of a Keepsake Art Album, rather than looking at photographs of products on a screen. You'll see full pricing laid out openly, so nothing about cost is left as a guess for later. And you'll plan the session itself, working out timing and location together so the day itself can simply be about your family. Our guide to what happens at that first consultation covers this meeting in more detail if you'd like to read ahead.
Most families come to this meeting as a couple, without the children, since it's a conversation rather than anything they need to sit through. It also means you can properly picture how a piece will look, standing next to it rather than glancing at a size chart on your phone.
Meeting two: the portrait session
The session is timed around sunrise or sunset, whichever light works better around your children's age and daily routine. A family with an early riser will land in a different slot to one with children who take a while to properly wake up, and that's worked out in the consultation rather than guessed on the day.
Where the session happens depends on what suits your family. Some choose our studio garden in Belgrave, others prefer somewhere further into the ranges, among the tall mountain ash of Sherbrooke Forest, the rhododendron gardens at Olinda, or the rolling paddocks around Puffing Billy country. Our guide to portrait locations across the Dandenong Ranges walks through the options if you're deciding between studio and location.
However this part goes, one thing stays the same. Arek directs a session, he doesn't pose it. Rather than lining everyone up and calling out where to stand, he sets up something real for your family to do together and photographs what happens as it unfolds. Children in particular tend to settle far faster into a game or a moment than into being told exactly how to smile.
The best portraits come from what your family actually does together, not from where I've told everyone to stand.
Portrait sessions cover more than family groups. Couples, pets and equine, personal branding and pregnancy are all part of what we shoot, and the same directed approach applies across each. For a family session specifically, the focus stays on the relationships in the room, siblings leaning into each other, a parent's hand on a shoulder, the small unposed moments that are easy to miss but hard to fake.
Meeting three: the design appointment
Roughly a week after your session, you'll come back to the gallery for the design appointment. This is where you see your images properly for the first time and choose your favourites, then work through how they'll actually look displayed in your home, sized, arranged, matched to a wall or a hallway or the space above a mantelpiece. Our guide to what a design appointment involves goes through this meeting step by step.
There's a genuine range of products to choose from, and part of this appointment is matching the right one to your family and your home rather than picking from a generic list. Options include:
- Premium canvas wall art, wrapped or framed, from 11x14" up to 36x55", starting from $450
- Designer Portfolio Prints, 8x12" prints presented in 11x14" mats, from $250
- Keepsake Art Albums, 8x8" or 11x11", from $3,500
- Wall Art Collections, multi-piece sets such as Belvedere, Casterly Rock, Dragonstone, Highgarden and Winterfell, from $2,750
- Framed Story Boards, including Windsor, Riverrun, Harrenhall and Iron Throne
- Round metal prints, a folio box, and a keepsake window box
Larger packages come with digital files included, though we don't sell full-resolution files on their own. All prices include GST, and most families end up investing somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 on their finished collection. Payment plans are available if that makes the decision easier to plan around. If you'd like to browse the full range before your appointment, our product guide is worth a look, and our family styling guide is a helpful place to start once you're thinking about what everyone will wear.
From your decision to your walls
Once you've designed your pieces at the design appointment, they go off to be artisan printed and hand-finished. That process takes up to three weeks, and your finished artwork is ready for collection once it's done. Collection is part of the experience, a chance to see and hold the finished pieces the same way you did back at that first consultation, except this time they're yours.
That's the whole arc of a Five Castles family session. Three meetings, each with one clear job, and a family, working with Arek at every stage, has more say over how the final result looks than a single rushed photoshoot ever tends to allow.
Every portrait begins with a conversation at the Belgrave gallery.