February Wrap-Up

Somehow it's already March.  I'm not complaining, but wow, time is flying.

February was an interesting month.  Some hardships, some nasty weather (four feet of snow in eight days), some beautiful weather (+16 and sunny!!!).   

We played with basement light and found more dust in my grandmother's basement.  We took some portraits and Valentine's Day blew in with the worst snowstorm I've ever seen.  The kids had five snow days in two weeks.  We showed Nanie some iPad tricks and took pictures in her bedroom mirror.  We got some gorgeous drawings done of the kids, played in the snow (upon snow, upon snow), and bought a birthday dress.   We made lemonade, went for a balmy walk, and spent hours in the fog.  We made friends with branch-dogs.

We survived.

The Makings of a Portrait

I am part of a portrait collective this year in which we all submit one portrait per month to a collaborative post.   Most of my portraits are a bit unconventional so I wanted to make this one very simple.  So simple that I didn't even brush my kid's hair or put different clothing on her.  I told her to stand by the wall and look at me, and then I free lensed.  It was kind of a fascinating endeavour.

First, she looked down, distracted by where to stand on the dog's bed (related: I have very little blank wall space in my house).

I managed to get some eye contact.  However, combined with the messy hair hanging over her face and the tilt of her head, the feral-child-look was perhaps a little TOO obvious.

I think I patted it down slightly?  The beauty of freelensing, too, though, is that you can change the plane of focus juuuuust slightly and things look different.  This was the photo I ended up using for the collaborative, despite finding the lighting a tad too harsh (coming in from the right through a window on our side door).

Look up at the window!  Obscure your face with hair!  

I tucked her hair behind her ear but that made her face a little too open and clear for the mood I was trying to obtain.  (Not to say it's not a good portrait - I love it - but it wasn't what I was going for.)

Finally, I got the light on her face exactly how it should be, and her eyes in focus; the only reason this was not the finalist for my post was that her face was a bit more neutral and I wanted it to be wilder.

Isn't it fascinating how six portraits taken in the course of about 45 seconds can all look so different?  This is one of the things I love most about photography - the split-second change in expression, head tilt, light, mood that ends up with a photo that reads altogether different from the one taken two seconds previous.

Check out the collaborative blog post here:  

https://theportraitcollective.com/blog/2017/2/15/february-collective

Just smile

I always find it somewhat entertaining when I share a photo of someone in my immediate family who is not smiling.  Inevitably there is always one commenter who has to say something about the fact that my daughter looks grumpy or my husband looks scary or my son looks sad. They always say it in such a way that makes me think there are people out there who really would prefer to only see smiling, happy photos.

Why do I share sober/sad/grumpy photos?

Because it's real life.

Documenting family life isn't all sun flares and happy kids doing arts & crafts.  I make sure to grab those moments, too (who am I kidding, we don't do arts & crafts) but it's not real if that's all I get.

For my own family, I want a record of all of our feelings.  The grumpy child, the stoic husband, the injury, the fight.  The boring moments that don't really look like anything. You know, sometimes my kids give me the gift of their play and their eye contact to make a wonderful photograph, but many times they are irritated at being interrupted, or they don't even notice I am there and continue on yelling at one another, or what have you.  I also aim to do this with client documentary sessions, because - like it or not - they often have elements of control by both the family and the photographer, and glimpses of "this is our reality" can be looked back on with emotion.

I love to create a photograph - to have a vision and follow it through - and I'm thankful that my husband and children oblige me on a regular basis.  But there is something so wonderful in the off-guard, the moody.  The reminder that, despite what we show about ourselves on social media, we've all got problems.  We don't smile 100% of the time.  That's okay.  The smile photos are plenty.   The other photos have their place in our life, too.

It's okay if my kids look sad.  Sometimes they are.  Nobody in my house is expected to be happy all the time.  You don't need to tell them to smile - because I can guarantee it will sneak back in soon.  A photograph gives you a fraction of a second's glimpse into my life.  Sometimes that section isn't perfect.

I also happen to think we are beautiful in every emotion.  How I love my daughter's jutted-out chin and my son's brown eyes when he is feeling confused.  Kids are so wonderful at expressing exactly how they feel.  This is childhood, caught in a frame.   Don't worry - my kids are not miserable.  They are kids.

January Wrap-Up

My goals for January included survival and not freezing to death (can you tell I'm still not acclimated to Canadian winters, despite being BORN here!?).  Photographically speaking, my goals were...nothing.  I don't do a 365 project (though I love that other people do and I enjoy watching their days unfold) or a once-a-week project or anything of the sort because I prefer to approach my work without commitment or expectation as much as I can.  

What I DID do in January: document, document, document.  I dropped my camera in the snow. I fell in love with my grandmother's basement.  We celebrated personal victories and made a "bum slide" on a snow hill.  We survived being powerless for 35 hours (thank you, WOOD STOVE) during an ice storm that is still being managed in the northern part of the province.  We played outside when the sun felt warm enough and I fell in love with late-afternoon light on my couch.

We did alright.

The first

We call you the firstborn.  You were actually born before we even got married, though only by six weeks.  We got married and thought a dog would be a good idea.  In the long term we were right; in the short term it was a hard few months, adjusting to married life, a full workload at school, a hard-working husband.

He wanted a lab, and we saw an ad in the paper for you.  A house in town, with three children and several cats, and this lab puppy who has just too much energy, the lady said on the phone, sounding wiped out.  Alright, we said, and we showed up at the door at suppertime, the height of chaos, because when Daddy gets an idea in his head, he doesn't budge.  There were children crying and people shouting and the man at the house tried desperately to explain your finer points.  Suddenly you barrelled around the corner, black as the night with a white star on your chest, and you launched yourself at Daddy's shoe, yanking on the laces with your sharp little puppy teeth, and for a moment he couldn't talk, until he was about to say you were ours.

You saw me through my final year of school, sitting and staring at me while I studied, barking to get my attention.  You survived getting run over by Daddy on his birthday.  You learned to retrieve ducks.  You laid your head on my lap when I cried and cried that March day.  A year and a half later we fretted over bringing home our new baby, and how you would react, and we even videoed the grand introduction, and you sniffed him once and carried on.  That kind of blind trust is what makes us love a dog.

You have seen us through illness and a second child and home renovations and a new truck and fishing at the brook and picking blackberries.  

Nowadays you are going on 13 years old, a grand old age for a dog, and your whiskers are grey and you sleep a lot and can't hear a darn thing.  

You also cannot appear normal in a photo to save your life.

I love that.