I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk behind the scenes on creating this portrait of my son with his cousins this past Christmas.  First off, if you have ever tried having a group of six small children together, you know it's pretty hard to get them to all stay sitting in one location, and getting them to all look at you at the same time and smile is next to impossible. There will almost always be someone looking the wrong way, crying, or trying to run away. So if you look at this image, you might be thinking 'well you got everyone smiling and looking at the camera'.

Now let me show you the original. 

Now you see we have the crier, looking the wrong way, and someone trying to sneak away to her mom hiding in the background. 

So how did I fix it? First I started by fixing the background. 

Once I had added the background back in, it starts to feel like it's coming together, but we aren't done yet. 

I had started by doing individual shots of each child before we brought them in for the final group shot, this helped them get used to the camera and the setup, and gave me a chance to get smiles from them individually to use for the group shot. In this case this little girl was crying, so I swapped this happy face into the final image. 

I also was able to get a smile from this little girl to swap with her not looking so sure about being with the group. 

I also was able to swap this little girl's smile onto her looking away. 

So here is the final result, three out of six children had a headswap. I could have also swapped the boys in the back to not be having a candy cane battle, but it was so typical of them that the parents liked it this way.