Michelle Bailey | Photography
A few months ago I made a slideshow for my mom’s birthday and ran into a problem I didn’t expect. I had hundreds of photos of my brother and me as kids, birthday cakes, beach days, a truly regrettable perm. My mom was in about six of them. She was the one holding the camera for twenty years. So this year my Mother’s Day photo plan is simple: she’s going in the frame, next to me, and nobody is going to be stuck behind the phone.
Moms are the family photographer and the missing person
When I went looking, I found out my family is completely typical. Shutterfly published its 2026 Family Photo Representation Study last week, based on a survey of 1,001 parents in April. Moms were 31% less likely than dads to have photos with their kids, and 73% of moms said they’re usually behind the camera when family moments happen. One in five moms said it had been several months since they’d been in a photo with their children.
The pattern shows up in the U.K. too. A survey of more than 500 mothers by the photo printer CEWE, reported by PetaPixel in March, found that 58% said they’re “almost never” in the frame, and 88% said they’re always or often the one taking the pictures. The part that got me was this: 66% said they feel sad about not having more photos of themselves from those years.
That’s the quiet cost of being the organized one. The family gets a beautiful archive, and the person who built it is mostly absent from it.
A Mother’s Day photo beats another brunch reservation
The National Retail Federation expects Mother’s Day spending to hit a record $38 billion this year, with the average shopper spending $284.25. Sixty-three percent plan to buy a special outing like dinner or brunch, and a record third of people plan to give an experience.
I love brunch. I’m still going to brunch. But a mimosa is gone by 1 p.m., and a good photo of you and your mom together will still be on her fridge in ten years. If you’re already planning to spend the day with her, the photo costs you twenty minutes and nothing else.
Most Mother’s Day photo guides I’ve read are pose lists: mom and baby on the bed, hands stacked, a flower crown. They’re cute, but they skip the actual reason moms are missing from photos. Someone has to hold the phone. If the person holding the phone is always the same person, she’ll never be in the picture. Solve that, and the poses barely matter.
The self-timer is the whole trick
You don’t need a photographer or a second person. You need the self-timer and something to lean the phone against. On an iPhone, the timer is tucked behind the arrow at the top of the Camera app, and you can set it for 3 or 10 seconds. If Live Photos is turned off, the timer fires a quick burst of frames instead of a single shot, which is exactly what you want with a group. Somebody always blinks. A burst means somebody else’s blink is in a different frame.
Use the 10-second setting. Three seconds sounds faster, but you’ll spend it running back to your spot and land in the photo mid-stride. Ten gives you time to sit down, put an arm around your mom, and stop thinking about the phone.
For a stand, a small phone tripod is nice, but a stack of cookbooks on a kitchen counter works. My photography beginner’s guide covers composition in more depth, but the one rule that matters here is height: put the lens at about chest height for seated people and eye level for standing ones. Phones propped on a low coffee table shoot up everyone’s nose, which no mother has ever wanted on her fridge.
Window light is the only lighting setup you need
Put your mom near a big window with the light falling across her face from the side, not from directly behind her. Morning or late afternoon is softer than noon. If the sun is hitting the glass directly, a sheer curtain turns it into the kind of light people pay for.
Turn off the flash. Phone flash flattens faces and makes skin look shiny, and a window does a far kinder job. If the room is dim, move closer to the glass instead of reaching for the flash.
Run the 20-minute Mother’s Day photo math
Here’s how I’m planning my twenty minutes, with the arithmetic, because it’s what convinced me this would actually work.
I’m picking four setups: the two of us on the couch by the window, the two of us at the kitchen table with coffee, my mom with the grandkids on the floor, and one standing shot by the front door on the way out to brunch. For each setup I’ll run the 10-second timer three times. With a burst on each round, call it about 10 frames each, that’s 30 frames per setup. Four setups at 30 frames is 120 frames.
Now the keeper rate. I’m generous with myself and assume one frame in 15 is good: eyes open, nobody mid-sentence, my mom actually smiling instead of saying “is it going?” That’s 120 divided by 15, or 8 good photos. Each setup takes about five minutes including the fussing, so four setups fit in 20 minutes. Eight real photos of your mom with her family, from one morning, beats the six I found from twenty years.
If you want to go a step further, print one. A single print in a frame is the gift. The other seven can live in a shared album she can scroll on her own phone.
Get her in the frame without making it a whole thing
Some moms hate being photographed, and the CEWE survey found 4% avoid it because they’re unhappy with how they look. Shutterfly found 39% of moms say they’re left out because they don’t feel ready or put together. So don’t announce a photo shoot at 8 a.m. Tell her you want a picture of the two of you before you leave for brunch, after she’s ready, and set the timer while you’re both laughing about something else. Candid frames from a burst are usually the best ones anyway.
I’ve also learned to let her see the photos right away and delete the ones she doesn’t like. That one gesture makes her far more willing to do it again next year. If she likes the look of an older camera, my post on the digicam trend might give you an excuse to dig hers out of a drawer.
This Mother’s Day, put the phone on the cookbooks, set the timer for ten seconds, and go sit next to your mom. The Mother’s Day photo she’ll keep is the one where she’s finally in it.