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Do you want to take photographs of your children that speak of real moments and real joy? http://www.quietgraces.com
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7 Tips for Real Pictures
of your Everyday Beautiful-Mess
Learn your camera.
It doesn’t matter if you’re using a cell phone, a point and shoot, or
a DSLR. Learn how to use it in modes other than Auto. Practice.
Practice. Practice.
Learning to use your camera properly helps you capture the images
just the way you want. You can blur the background or keep the
whole image in focus. You can capture movement without using on
camera flash. Most importantly, you begin to think about what you
want to capture before you click the shutter and that is when you
move from just capturing an image to creating intentional art.
If you need more help learning than just reading a camera manual,
jump into my Free Beginner Photography Class. Expecting to take
good pictures, but not being willing to learn your camera is like ex-
pecting to write your name without holding a pen!
Never Make your Kids say “Cheese.”
When you’re cap-
turing the every-
day, asking kids to
look at the camera
and smile often
produces photos
that look fake.
There’s nothing
cheesier than the
photo of your kid
with a fake smile
standing next to
the big city monument, or holding a bottle of glitter, or stopped in the
middle of the trail.
Instead,
capture
their real joy
as they in-
teract with
their world
uninter-
rupted. It’s
okay if they’
re so en-
grossed in
their craft
that they never look at you. Focus on their hands doing the work or
the work itself. It’s alright if the only picture you got of your child
with Mickey Mouse was the one with the red face and tears. It’s
even better if the only smile you can coax your 3 month old to give
the camera is the one where daddy is standing over her making a
goofy face.
My favorite snap of my daughters is this one as they spontaneously
held hands and walked to the beach. I really wanted them to face me
on this bridge but they wouldn’t cooperate for that. They were too
eager to adventure together onto the beach. And this was the story
of this entire mini-vacation: two little girls (and a little sand monster
boy) begging to go one more time down to the water.
Make
peace with
your desire
to photo-
graph per-
fection.
When we’re
chasing af-
ter toddlers
and chil-
dren, we’re likely to get just one or two photographs that are perfect
in each 50-200 images we take. But ‘perfect’ pictures don’t tell the
real or full story. Dare to tell the full story: your children will be glad
you captured these real moments.
Photograph the Simple Moments
You can’t capture the everyday beauti-
ful-mess if you only pull out your cam-
era at on vacation or on holidays.
Pull out your camera at bath time. Pull
it out when the kids are playing with
play dough. Pull it out when the baby
is crying and you’re at your wits end.
Snap photos of spaghetti night.
Snap self portraits as you and your
husband walk downtown after a date.
Grab that shot of your two year old
pulling boogers out of his nose. Bring
the camera when you’re taking an
evening walk and look for the beauty in
the season.
The series of images in this section were all taken when my girls
were 16 months old and were both having ear tubes placed. This
isn’t something typically photographed, but these captures bring
back every memory of this day for me: the tears and the relief. But
more than that, I can see each of my twins personality clearly dis-
played: Aeralind, timid and tearful. Bronwyn, fearless and expressive.
Don’t reserve the camera for special occasions. Photograph real
life!
Capture the Details
We’re often drawn to
take the big picture
images: the child
twirling in the yard, the
boat floating on a
harbor, and the whole
flower. However, of-
tentimes the everyday
stories can be told just
as well with an image
of a single detail.
After all, doesn’t memory work in detail? I bet if you share with me
the memory of your favorite day every thing you say will be a re-
corded memory of a detail. The look on your fiancé’s face when he
proposed. The smell of the kitchen on Thanksgiving. The first mo-
ment when you held your baby. These are all detail memories. Don’t
be afraid to record your memories in detail images.
The juxtaposition of pretty wild flowers and 4 hour old dirty break-
fast dishes tells the story of a mom too eager to keep having fun to
clean up the mess.
The dirt under a tod-
dler’s fingernails tells
an entire story of eve-
ryday conquest. A
close up of the biggest
sunflower the kids
grew. Chunky baby
thighs. The curls that
disappeared after the first
hair cut. Bare toes in the
grass tell of the onset of
warm weather. That little
hand clutching yours on a
walk tells the story of the
brief and trusting season of
childhood.
Get in close and capture
the little details that make
your day to day unique. Af-
ter all, life really is a group
of details strung together to
tell a story. Capture those
unique moments.
Before you Scream or Cry in a Crazy Moment:
Go get the Camera.
My twins were 16 months old and I had first trimester exhaustion. I
fell asleep for 30 minutes on the couch and woke up to both of them
playing happily in the fireplace. I just wanted to cry because I really
didn’t have the energy to give them a bath. Instead, I grabbed the
camera. This image always bring me back to that day emotionally,
but in retrospect it also makes me laugh at the sheer absurdity.
Obviously I
have many
such mo-
ments in
every day. I
have a
sneaky sus-
picion that
you do too.
There’s red
paint left
unattended and the joys of toddlers unrolling toilet paper. There’s
those ten seconds you and your friend turned away to talk while your
children tore into her pantry shelves. These are the real moments of
motherhood. Pure chaos erupting from the little people you love most
while they learn about their world.
Grab the camera when you want to scream in anger or cry over-
whelmed. Oftentimes, just having the camera in my hand gives me a
new perspective on just how funny motherhood is. Plus these real
and raw images really round out a photo album or scrapbook simply
because
they have
the best
stories at-
tached to
them.
Capture Different Perspectives
Most of the images of our children
that we take feature the same per-
spective. We’re standing over them
and looking down on them. We
may be really close to them and
looking almost directly down or we
might be across the room, but
we’re still standing at our full height.
A few great images need this van-
tage point, but most images of chil-
dren benefit from a change in per-
spective.
Let’s go over the perspectives we
can use.
Above
Shooting from high above a child
can make the child seem small. It
can also clear
away some of
the foreground
or background
clutter.
Shooting from
above can cap-
ture the details
of the child’s
surroundings that we wouldn’t be able to see if we were looking on
them directly. Think about how different an image of a child playing
with a train table would be if we took it standing on a chair or ladder
above them rather than standing across the room.
Shooting from above is also a great vantage point to capture your
child’s “Uh oh, momma caught me!” look. Or to make those “How did
you escape your clothes AGAIN?!” moments seem modest.
Eye level
Getting eye
level with
your child
completely
changes your
vantage point
from our
usual photo
taking per-
spective of
above our
children.
Eye level invites us into a child’s
world. We see what our children
see. We have to squat or sit or
crawl to see the world at this level
which is the primary reason this
perspective is rarely used in our
homes. I promise the discomfort is
worth the images that eye level
creates.
Eye Level perspective draws in
some details from the surroundings
but is still a great perspective to re-
duce some clutter.
Lower
Getting images from this perspective is physically difficult. We’ve
moved from squatting to army crawling in the front yard. We could also
position our children on a hill or a deck or in a tree above us. This per-
spective is unique and will make eye catching images.
Lower Perspectives make the child look larger than life. Children im-
mersed in their superhero worlds or walking about in mom’s high heels
benefit from having their photograph taken from this perspective. Jumps
into rain puddles would be epic in this perspective.
Framed or Hidden
Framed or Hidden perspectives require some creative thinking to
achieve but can really make excellent images.
A framed image has a physical frame around a subject. Photograph-
ing your child standing in the frame of your window creates a framed
perspective. Or through an arch of leaves. Or through the frame at the
top of the slide. Framed perspectives help keep our focus on our sub-
jects even when we have a lot of background clutter.
A hidden perspective is very similar to a framed perspective except
that the frame surrounding our subject is likely very close to our lens
rather than close to the subject. Hidden perspectives give us a sense
that we’re peaking into lives in a fun sort of sneaky way.
This is a shot of my little Aeralind where I used the crib rails to create a
hidden perspective. The rails are so close to the lens that they blur out,
but the sleeping child lets us know what they are. To create a hidden
perspective we shoot through things: crib rails or underneath a coffee
table or the branches of a tree to create a sense that we’ve eavesdrop-
ping on a child’s world. There’s lots of fun potential in this perspective
for shooting!
Print Your Memories
Before last year and my Home-Life Project 52, I was so guilty of
filling my hard drive
with images and
never printing them.
What’s the use of
diligently capturing
the everyday beau-
tiful-mess if we
don’t enjoy it? So I
committed to mak-
ing an album page
a week for the year
of 2012. I have two
beautiful photo
books from that
year that we treas-
ure and my children
often flip through
and ask for stories.
Writing this for you has reminded me how much I need to sit down an
work on this year’s album!
There are lots of options for enjoying your photos. You can do a
photo book like I did. Shutterfly and other services make this a super
easy drop and drag process. You can print images at 4x6 and slip
them in an old style photo album. You can scrapbook them if you
have the time and passion for it. You can print images and pick like
colored frames and create a gallery wall. Or you can enjoy a few
canvases in your living room. You can even make coasters, magnets,
mouse pads, or mugs or stickers as gifts.
But please don’t let your precious memories sit on a hard drive
waiting to be enjoyed. Enjoy them! Printed memories are a keepsake
that promotes family storytelling.
A Note From the Author
Hi, there! I’m Melissa Aldrich of Quiet Graces Photography based out
of Greenville, SC. I photograph Maternity, Birth, and Newborn Sessions
as well as two seasonal Lifestyle Family Mini-Sessions. But most of all
I’m a mommy to Aeralind, Bronwyn, and Sedryn. I chase them around
with a camera from sun up to sun down and sometimes when they’re
sleeping and I sneak a few moments to write about them and mother-
hood over on my blog. I hope you enjoyed some of my captures.
I’m so glad you’re walking this journey with me to take better photo-
graphs of your everyday mess. I’m passionate about capturing my chil-
dren’s childhood in a manner that expresses their real days. I know that
all too soon I will blink and they will all be in college. Seriously, how are
my daughters just 1 year and a
few months away from being a
half decade old?
My heart for you is to be in-
spired to use your camera
(whether it’s a DSLR or a point
and shoot or an iPhone) to cap-
ture the everyday beauty in your
days: both the moments that
make you want to cry and those
that make your soul sing. I hope
you display those memories in a
way that promotes the sharing of
stories.