My children know all too well the curse of bring a photographers child. Firstly, they know when I pick up my camera, I want them to behave a certain way. Secondly, they can’t be bothered with it.
Saturday morning, my daughter was in a good enough mood to model for a new kind of session I wanted to try out. The session was to be a glitter session. Sound like the mess of nightmares right? Rest assured, I add the glitter in post production. Else it would be the stuff of nightmares!
As a side bonus, she didn’t have any food stuck in her hair either. Win! It was definitely the day! I brought down her dress and slipped it on, brushed her hair and added a little headband. Beautiful.
As all parents I’m sure are aware, taking photos of children from walking age to around age 3 is not easy. My daughter, at 23 months and already showing signs of the terrible twos and a huge amount of sass, is no exception.
It was all going well. She had two fake flowers and was darting about happily waving them like she was conducting an orchestra, but then she spotted my felted Teddies. They are way too fragile to be ragged about by a toddler. Thus she threw a full blown wobbler and that was that, game over.
I went to see if my Son wants to be model. I am a firm believer that sessions are not gendered and although you see more girls in these kinds of sessions, there is absolutely no reason why a boy shouldn’t have one too.
Generally, the Boy takes modelling for me pretty well. Furthermore, if he knows I want to practise some photos he will usually rush off an put on his favourite outfit at that moment.
The issue is thus. His favourite outfit of the moment is usually somewhere between Pirate, Elsa or just underpants. This weekend, it was Batman. I will mention at this stage that his Batman costumes legs are about 3 inches too short due to it being his oldest costume and far too small. I explained that Batman wasn’t really the look I was going for. He dashed off.
A few minutes passed. I heard him banging around upstairs (likely struggling to get out of the Batman costume). He reappeared, proud as punch in a red party dress from my client closet. I asked if he would prefer jeans and t shirt. He declined and said his dress was perfect because its beautiful.
Subsequently, I captured a bunch of photos of him twirling around, pulling karate style poses and being cute. In conclusion, they aren’t really any good for work purposes but lovely family photos we will treasure.
That left me with one option if I wanted to practise these photos. Self portrait.
Consequently, I’ll give it another go with the kids next weekend, but the curse of being a photographers child will likely get more annoying for them the older they get. However, we are truly blessed to have so many photos to look back on as our little family grows (in age, not numbers!).
To see more of my work, click Gallery. Here is a the photo of my daughter from this session and my self portrait.
