How to Take Pictures of Your Kids (Part 1: Mindset)
This is a weird title for a blog post, because obviously, all you have to do to take a picture of your kid is point your phone at them and press the camera button. I’m not talking about the technical aspect of taking pictures of your kids, though (at least not in this post). I’m talking about how to get in the headspace that’ll allow you to document your life with your kids while both living in the moment and thinking about the future.
5 Tips for Organizing and Enjoying your Photos in the Age of Digital Clutter
Always, the key is to make finding and seeing your photos as frictionless as possible. If it’s too hard or overwhelming for us to revisit our favorite memories, we just won’t do it. Remove some of those barriers and take a few easy steps that make it easier for you and your loved ones to engage with the story of your lives. It’s so worth it!
Taking Pictures of My Own Life is Hard
I guess I should offer some concrete advice. Here are my recommendations for making photos of your own life (cell phones work great!)
Moments worth documenting happen everywhere—even FamilyMart.
I often joke over the fact that so many of the families I work with include a trip to the neighborhood FamilyMart or 7-11 in their session time. I seriously could make a book with these convenience store photos at this point, which tells me that there’s something important going on here. I think the neighborhood convenience stores are embedded in our family routine now. When we look back on these photos, we remember hot summers in Taiwan, the smell of tea eggs, and picking out our favorite ice cream from the freezer in the back. We think of the way our kids skipped down the street thinking of the treat that was waiting for them, and then the sticky popsicle kiss that we got afterward. These are the gems.
Taking My Time with Family Photography
I love to see how defenses fall and behavior becomes more uninhibited the more time I spend with a family. There’s a good chance a child will end up jumping on the bed naked, and yes, I will photograph it for you.
Who do I photograph for?
I’m not the first photographer to say this but it bears repeating: photographing for ourselves yields better results than photographing for other people, even when you’re technically making the photos for other people. There’s no way for me to scientifically prove this, but I swear making photos that I would want of my own family gives them some sort of pixie dust. Also, I have a very simple probably kind of small brain—it’s not big enough to hold things like experimentation, curiosity, and wonder if it’s also holding other people’s expectations. Maybe those are the ingredients to the pixie dust.
A month at home with family and why photography feels more important than ever.
I spend a lot of time assuring my clients that their everyday routine—and all of the happy/sad/funny/boring/weird moments that are cultivated in the space of that routine—are worth capturing and looking back on. The month of November was my turn to live out that belief.
Shooting what it feels like, not what it looks like.
There are many little tricks that help keep my observational senses primed so that I can notice the emotional, the fleeting, in other words, the interesting—using a wide angle lens and shooting in it, not at it, slowing down. But perhaps my favorite mantra that I like to keep in mind is shoot what it feels like, not what it looks like.
Kids cry a lot—do you want to remember it?
As a documentary family photographer in Taipei, Taiwan—a place where true documentary family photography is virtually unheard of at the moment—I am always helping people put a name to the thing that they know they want deep down but don’t know what to call it or how to get it. Most of my clients also get posed photos or lifestyle photos to put in a Christmas card for Grandma, but for them, for the photos they hold in their hands and look back on while they’re crying laughing over the way their kid is wearing underwear on his head, they want real moments. They know that the kind of moments that elicit a deep emotional response don’t typically come from standing in a field at sunset, but most of them don’t realize that what they’re looking for is documentary photography until they find me.
Documenting Family on Vacation
I thought I knew what I would be photographing when I started documenting families: people at home among their things and their routine; wanting to preserve a slice of life while they were in their element. What I didn’t expect was how many people would hire me to document their families while they were out of their element, crammed in a hotel room with underwear drying on a shower curtain and suitcases that looked like they had projectile vomited diapers and onesies across the room.
Word Muses
I’ve done some online training for documentary family photography that suggests identifying a muse once you arrive for a session. This doesn’t mean that you only photograph this person, but the idea is that most of the interesting things happen around the muse. If you keep your eye on the muse and what they’re doing, you’ll end up with better storytelling photos for everyone.
I sometimes do this, but what’s even more helpful to me is latching onto certain word themes that come up repeatedly when I’m chatting with a client. If it keeps coming up, there’s a deeper story happening here. They’re no longer just words, but symbols for something deeply meaningful to this family.