Photographing My Kids

Do you know what I am doing today?  Placing people's final photography orders.  People.  This is HUGE.  There is light at the end of the tunnel.  I am almost finished with this fall's photography sessions.  If you were wondering why I've posted so few blogs lately... that's why.  But I am almost done! Hallelujah.



I took the kids up to McKinney the other day to see Chestnut Square Historical Village, which is really cool!  The "mom-tographer" group I'm a part of hosted little photo-op stations, with the grand finale of a little table with COOKIES on it.  This, I assure you, made the whole outing worth it from the kids' perspective.



Sometimes I really worry that I'm photographing the kids too much and that they'll resent me for it someday.  Or even right now!  I'm torn, because I want the kids to have genuine fun and not feel like they're performing for a camera... but at the same time, I do want to capture them enjoying themselves, and I'm not good at sketching.  So photos it is.



Some people have asked me how I get them to pose and smile.  Particularly people in the mom-tographer group, many of whose kids are a little older and have seriously out-grown the whole pose-and-smile stage.



My answer is that once I get them how I want them to be posed, then I tell them to stay there, and I try to engage them in conversation or song.  I start clicking when they're engaged.  Because if I just start taking photos of them posed there, they come out terrible.



Here Elliot and I were playing a little "game" -- where he would scooch toward me on his knees, and I would say (laughing), "hold still!! No scooching!!No scooching!!!"  He thought this was a hilarious game.



Here, I asked Lucy questions about Doc Mcstuffins -- about her favorite episode, and about the characters in the episodes she loves.



Here, the kids were pretty much done and were giving all their attention to their cookies, in a sort of zombies-eating-brains kind of way.  So after asking them to look at me myriad times, I just referred to an "inside joke" we have... where I say, "don't laugh!  don't laugh!!"  and boom.  They laugh.  Except not Elliot, this time.  But that's ok.



I am still so new to photography, relatively speaking... and am still learning so much.  It is unreal how much goes into exceptional portraits, and I don't think I'm there yet.  But someday.  And in the mean time, gosh it's fun to have pictures of our kids!  My parents used to take pictures all. the. time.  Daniel's did, too.  Now I get it.  It is way fun.


I keep taking these little mental snapshots, so that I can remember the kids at these ages... the funny things they do and say, and their facial expressions, which seem to always be changing.  But thanks to the most laughably terrible nights of sleep imaginable, with interruptions from all three kids often topping 8/night... my memory formation is shot.  Thus, the photos.