Bar Mitzvah Photography & Film · Lakewood, NJ
Old enough to remember.
A bar mitzvah is the first simcha that belongs to the child. We photograph the tefillin, the leining, and the seudah with the same seriousness we bring to a chuppah — and the same patience we bring to a thirteen-year-old.
Photographs, or films?
Two crafts, one team — choose how you want to see the bar mitzvahs.
The Films begin.
Bar mitzvah photography, in full
What a bar mitzvah asks of a camera.
A bar mitzvah is not one event. It is several spread across a week — hanachas tefillin, the leining, the seudah, often a Shabbos — and photographing it well means treating each on its own terms rather than as a short wedding.
The tefillin
Hanachas tefillin usually happens on a weekday morning in shul, a month or so before the bar mitzvah itself — a boy wrapping tefillin for the first time, with his father beside him. It is the quietest moment of the whole season and one of the most photographed walls in a Jewish home, and we cover it as part of bar mitzvah photography, not as an afterthought.
The leining
A camera in shul has to know how to behave: where a camera may stand, no flash, and no need for the gabbai to explain anything twice. We photograph the leining and the aliyah with the same seriousness we bring to a chuppah — that has been this studio’s line from the beginning, and it is meant literally.
Shabbos
Many bar mitzvahs live around Shabbos, so the coverage is built around it: portraits before, the weekday leining, and the melave malka after. Nothing is photographed on Shabbos itself, and the schedule is planned so that nothing a family expects is missing because of it.
The seudah
The seudah is where the photography gets hard — a hall in the evening, candlelight, a dance floor full of thirteen-year-olds, and a pshetl the boy has practiced for months and will say exactly once. It is also where the pictures a family keeps come from: the speech, the dancing, and a boy on his friends’ shoulders late in the night.
Photography and film, one team
CJ Studios is one in-house team for both photography and cinema — one contract, one schedule, and two crafts that already know how to work the same room instead of two vendors meeting for the first time at the seudah.
Where we photograph bar mitzvahs
The studio is based in Toms River, New Jersey, twenty minutes from Lakewood, and photographs bar mitzvahs across Ocean County — Lakewood, Toms River, Jackson — as well as Brooklyn, Passaic, Teaneck, Monsey, the Five Towns, and the wider tri-state area.
The date is set. Now keep it.
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