My little girl Sophie….i keep calling her little but she is now 8 going on 16, doesn’t play with toys, appears to be turning into a computer programmer (!!???) has started street dancing and is so up to date with music and latest trends BUT she will always be my little girl even when she’s towering above me and i’m thin and grey!
Well she is always my assistant when setting up for any shoots “Soph can you just come and sit on this spot so i can get my settings right” Is probably my most used sentence! But she cannot sit….she has to pose, as soon as the camera is lifted i don’t know what happens…well, this happens..
I got a shock when i did my very first proper kids shoot a few years ago…Soph had always just ‘done it’ in front of the camera and i soon realised that a lot of children don’t even want to have a camera pointed at them and that the ‘counselling’ and getting to know them before you can even start is probably the most important part and crucial to getting good relaxed photos of children in the studio.
But why do we want photos of our kids, is it to just document how they look at a certain age or is it to capture who they are as an individual? Because surely that’s what is most important, we want to look back at photos and see THEM, not the startled kid that has been plonked on a box and been told to smile.
So when it comes to the photos i really love, well they are the ones that kinda happen by accident, caught in the moment, or even when things don’t go to plan but turn out better anyway.
Like this……
We went to feed the horses, and i took my camera because i wanted to take some photos of them while we were there. THEN it absolutely poured down, we got drenched!! But it was so funny, and i slipped in horse poo while i was trying to get a few pics of Soph as she was running from the rain. And they aren’t well taken photos, the composition isn’t great, the light is dull…but they have the memories that are attached to them.
CANDID 1 / POSED 0