Finding Joy: At the park

Monday, February 13, 2012

At the park

I take a lot of pictures of my children. I'm pretty sure that I've written this before, but I have very few pictures of myself before the age of 4. I guess that is pretty normal when you have a 15 year old biological mother and spent a good chunk of time in foster care. I always wished that I had more pictures of myself from when I was a baby....I have less than 10. Add to my history the fact that I love photography and the outcome is a very well documented childhood for my little ones. People have commented on the sheer volume of pictures that I take of my kids and I've been asked if they ever get annoyed at the lens in their face. The answer to that is yes. They do get annoyed with me on occasion! A lot of the pictures I take are candid ones.....snapping shots as life happens. I try not to bug the girls too much with "look at the camera, give me a big smile, move your bangs out of your eyes," etc. but it does happen. I think more than anything, they are just used to it. All three girls have had a camera in their face since they were born. Every time we go somewhere I have my camera out capturing moments. It's just what I do. I try and balance my picture taking with being in the moment and having fun and occasionally I won't even bring my camera along, but most of the time it's there and I'm taking pictures.

Eleanor is at an age where it's really easy to take pictures of her. She's happy and smiley all the time and always doing cute photo worthy things. She's eager to please and all I have to do is say her name and she looks up at my camera smiling. The older girls are kind of a mixed bag. Maddie is generally anti-photos. She doesn't want to cooperate, she doesn't have the patience to hold still while I tweak my camera settings and most of the time she just wants to be difficult....not smiling, making funny faces, turning her head away from me. But lately she has also been requesting that I take pictures of her doing certain things, and there have been a couple occasions where she was totally and completely "into" me having a little photo session with her. Charlotte has always been my photogenic child. She hams it up for the camera and follows direction really well. I can get her to do just about anything and she'll do it again and again until I get it right. As of late she has been doing a lot of princess posing....head tilting to her shoulder, hands tucked under her chin, batting her eyelashes. This drives me insane. I am not a fan of the super posed princess look and I have been working at distracting her so that she'll just be normal in pictures. She's still pretty good at taking directions and doing things that I ask of her, even if they are wacky, or boring. Both girls dislike it when I try and take pictures of them while they are busy doing things like crafts, and both girls have recently shown a big interest in taking pictures using my camera. I've been letting them use my camera a little more and I'm always surprised at how good their composition is. It surprises me, because my camera is very heavy and they are able to hold it still and shoot in focus. I think their interest in photography is great and I hope to foster that in them. I was thinking that next Christmas might be a good time to get them their own digital cameras.....not like little kid ones and not expensive DSLRs either. Something in between.....a real camera with a big LCD screen that would be easy for them to work with. We'll see.

I'm not really sure where all of the above came from. I never have a plan for what I'm going to write when I blog.....it just appears. With all of that said, the weather has been nice & we took the girls to the park in our neighborhood. We all had a lot of fun and I took a lot of pictures. The end.