A Lesson in Taking Pictures of Kids

I hate spending money on pictures. Especially large amounts of money, which is usually the case when it comes to getting pictures done professionally. I understand that professional photography takes a lot of equipment and editing, but I can't afford to spend outlandish amounts of money every 5 or 6 months when a major holiday or birthday roll around.

So, I spent outlandish amounts of money on my own fancy, expensive DSLR camera. Because of course I'd rather spend hundreds of dollars on MYSELF instead of someone else. And also because while the last two paid professional photo shoots resulted in large framed photos on my wall, they aren't the best pictures I've ever seen. So if I can do even half as good as some studio with my expensive beast of a camera, then I'm saving millions of dollars in the long run, right? RIGHT?

Here's a life lesson for you. Just because you buy a fancy camera that costs more than your couch does NOT mean that suddenly you're an award winning photographer. It may boost your ego carrying around a big heavy camera around your neck that gives you arthritis, but that's pretty much as far as it's going to take you unless you surrender your soul spend as much time as possible learning it, taking classes, reading dry photography jargon every dry waking moment, and getting out in the down and dirty and taking THOUSANDS of pictures to get FIVE good shots of a vase. 

The hardest thing in the universe to take pictures of is kids. Especially young kids. Like mine. They move. Fast. Their attention spans are short, and so if they are doing something cute, by the time you take the tenth of a second to turn on the camera and smash it against your face, they are already off doing something else. AND THEY MOVE. A LOT. So learning how to shoot great pictures with a fancy camera by taking pictures of KIDS is just about the worst thing you could do for your health. I fail more at taking pictures of my kids than the Mariners fail at hanging on to above-average players. That's pretty hard to do. 

Usually, Calen hates getting his picture taken. He will say "cheese", but he will purposefully look the other way. He will do whatever it takes to NOT make eye contact with the camera. Of course Cam is smiling perfectly. Then Calen finally starts to cooperate, but Cam is crawling away. He's done. Then Calen starts whining. He's done too. I bribe snacks. Candy. TV. I try one more round, but it's hopeless. Cam is trying to pull himself up on Calen and Calen is disgusted that Cam is touching him. I give up. I take them inside and change them. The days run is over.

So let me give you this piece of advice when it comes to taking pictures of kids:


DON'T DO IT!!! It's too hard! It's SO frustrating! It makes my brain melt into silly putty and ooze out my ears so crazy people can put it in little eggs and sell it in gumball machines.

No I'm not really serious. Take pictures of your kids. Take lots of pictures. Because they're newborns and cooing and all cute little balls of baby and then you go to the grocery store to buy tortillas and come back and suddenly they're humongous and EATING your tortillas. So in between this tortilla time frame you seriously need to be taking pictures. So spend a million dollars on a nice camera, curse at it, threaten it's life, throw it across the room DO NOT THROW IT but think very strongly about it, read all the boring shit about it and then use it to your advantage (or not). 


I wanted nice spring/Easter pictures of the boys. So I bought overpriced argyle shirts for them. Because every young boy is required to have pictures in an argyle shirt. And fancy hats. Which are kind of ridiculous but in a "ridiculously cute" sort of way. So I forced them to wear them today and sit together and be all "awww I love you you're my brother" to each other while I took like 400 pictures. And they ACTUALLY cooperated, smiled, looked at me and I got BEAUTFIUL pictures.....OF A GODDAMN FENCE. 


Yep, I'm still learning about partial metering or spot metering or whatever type of metering it is, and focusing and all that nonsense that clearly I require a phD to understand. In short. The boys are out of focus. the fence behind him is crystal clear. The pictures are ruined. And most importantly, I have to have a groundhog day and do it ALL over tomorrow. And the WORST part of it is I can't go return the argyle shirts that still have the tags on them (that I pose the kids carefully so you can't see the tags) and get my $25 back. Which of course makes me want to jump to conclusions and chuck my camera out the window. But really I love my camera almost as much as my husband (except I don't sleep with it or call it "honey"). 


Luckily I got a couple okay shots of the kids individually. But absolutely not a single one of them together. Groundhog day tomorrow.

Almost good pictures of these too miscreants. Now I need to learn photoshop to make these pictures actually nice.

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