Your first consultation: what actually happens

At Five Castles Portraits, the first consultation is a one-hour meeting at our gallery in Belgrave, before a single photograph is taken. You'll meet Arek, see and hold finished pieces of artwork in the room rather than on a screen, and see full pricing laid out openly. By the end of the hour you'll also have a plan for your actual portrait session, timing, location and all, so nothing is left vague once you walk out the door.

The first of three meetings

A Five Castles portrait experience runs across three separate meetings, and the consultation is the first. It comes before the session, and well before the design appointment where you eventually choose your favourite images and design the finished pieces. Keeping these apart matters. If we tried to squeeze planning, shooting and choosing into one visit, you'd be making decisions about artwork before you'd even seen your own portraits, which is a strange way to ask a family to spend money. Instead, each meeting has one job. The consultation's job is simple: get to know each other, and get everything organised so the session itself can just be about your family.

Meeting at the gallery in Belgrave

The consultation happens in person at our gallery in Belgrave, in the Dandenong Ranges, and it's by appointment only rather than a walk-in shop. That's a deliberate choice. An hour with one family, with nobody else moving through the space, means the conversation isn't rushed and isn't shared. You'll sit down with Arek, talk about your family, your children's ages and personalities, and what you're hoping to end up with on your walls. There's no script to follow and nothing you need to prepare in advance. Most parents arrive without a clear picture of what they want, and that's entirely normal. Working it out together is the reason the meeting exists.

Most families come as a couple, without the children in tow, since it's a conversation rather than anything the kids need to sit through. That's not a rule, just what tends to work best, since it lets you focus on the questions in front of you rather than keeping an eye on a toddler in a room full of framed glass. If bringing them along is easier for your family, that's fine too. There's nothing to prepare beforehand and nothing you'll be asked to decide before you've had a proper look at what's on offer.

Seeing and holding the finished artwork

Photographs on a phone screen and a finished piece of artwork are two different things, and the gap between them is hard to explain until you've held both. During the consultation, you'll see and hold actual pieces, canvas wall art, framed prints, the pages of a Keepsake Art Album, so you can feel the weight of the canvas, the finish on a frame, the way a printed page differs from a phone photo. Craft matters here more than anything you could describe over the phone. It's much easier to picture a large canvas above your own staircase, or a small collection displayed along a hallway, once you've stood next to the real thing rather than imagined it from a size chart.

Prices, shown openly

We don't hide pricing behind an enquiry form or make you ask twice. At the consultation, you'll see exactly what things cost, from a single piece of wall art through to the larger collections, and we walk through it together rather than leaving you to guess. Most families end up investing somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 on their finished artwork, and payment plans are available if that helps spread the decision. If you'd rather read through the numbers before you come in, our guide on what a family portrait costs covers the same ground in more detail. Either way, nothing about pricing is left as a surprise for later.

Planning your session together

Once you've seen the artwork and the pricing, the rest of the hour is spent planning the part that actually involves a camera: your portrait session. We'll talk through timing, sessions are built around sunrise or sunset, when the light is at its best, and we'll work out which of those two suits your children's routine. A family with an early riser and a toddler who unravels by late afternoon will land in a different spot to a family whose children take a while to wake up properly. We'll also talk through location, whether that's our studio garden here in Belgrave or somewhere further out among the ranges, and settle on a plan that fits how your family actually lives, not a generic time slot copied from the last booking.

This is also where Arek explains how he actually works during a session, directing rather than posing, so you know what to expect once the day arrives. Some families picture stiff, lined-up shots and stop-and-smile instructions. That's not how a Five Castles session runs. Arek sets up moments and gives your family something real to do together, then photographs what happens naturally, which tends to put children at ease far faster than being told exactly where to stand and how to smile.

By the time you leave the gallery, you'll have a date, a time of day, a location, and a rough sense of what you're working towards on the wall at home. Nothing about it needs to feel like a decision made under pressure. It's simply the groundwork that lets the session itself be about your children, not about logistics worked out on the day.

If you're not sure what to wear yet, our free family styling guide is worth a look closer to the session itself, though none of that needs sorting at the consultation stage. That part comes later, once the date is locked in and the planning from this first meeting is already done.