Category: kids portraits

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Children and Gastropods

I had a vision of what I wanted.  It was a lovely idea for an image for a publicity thing: boy playing with snail.

It was intended to epitomise everything that is great about how I work with kids: let them play and take photographs that capture the joy of their age.  The feeling of boundless discovery, imaginative play, intensely thoughtful moments, living in the now.

Simple, right?  So what do we need?  Boy – check.  Snail….  OK, get the Boy to find the Snail.  Who better? Easy.

Off he goes down the garden and finds two (apparently he knew they were there cos his sister found them) – we choose the biggest.

So what next? Set up the scene. Put the Snail on the nice rustic (aka rotten) wooden table and let the Boy ‘discover’ the Snail.

Only the Snail is having none of it.  The Boy is happy for a bit chatting to the snail and waiting for it to show itself.  But the Snail is safely tucked away in his shell and has no intention of playing along.  No matter how much he sings to it.

So he gets fed up (actually we both do) and we go off and find some leaves, a strawberry and some blackberries and hope that the the Snail just needs ‘a little more time’.

But my primadonna Snail is still not playing along. It’s getting dark and tea is ready. Doesn’t this guy know we’re on a schedule!

Going to bed he’s still there unmoved but by morning he’s gone.  Let’s hope the Song Thrushes didn’t get him.

And you thought it was hard to work with kids!

Family Photographer Cork
Primadonna Snail

 

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Starting School

School Photographer
Ready for School

Good Luck to everyone starting school this week.

The Small Fella’s big day is tomorrow and yesterday was the big ‘try on’ day and we were all on shock: he looks so big (typical thing for us to say I know); but he also took to it so well. Boys eh?

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Seen through the eyes of a child

The Small Fella was caught rotten by his sisters writing on a book.  Bad news!

But in this case, although he was told it was wrong, he was forgiven for two reasons:

  1. He said ‘sorry’
  2. This particular book is one of mine that I had as a kid.  This should make me more upset that he’s defaced this priceless heirloom but in fact those same books hold the signature of another small boy: my own.
  3. What he drew was remarkable.

Clearly this was a signed representation of our family and he’s gone to some length to make sure that we were individually represented.  This morning over breakfast we got the low-down on who was who

I kinda guessed which one was me cos he’d drawn something in one the character’s hands that looked kind of familiar:

That’s your camera Dad

So clearly that’s now he sees me out on a family walk.  Maybe I should leave the camera at home more often. But if you think that’s bad, those things coming out of Mom’s head are ‘her snores’!

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Daisy Days – 1

Although they’re here all sumer, June is definitely the big month for daisies. The last couple of years I’ve tried to get the kids together to get something going with the daisies but it just never seems to work out.

It’s a lovely idea but in the end they are just sooo small.  And all that intent on making daisy chains just looks like something else.

But this year we got out in the woods and parks an awful lot and this loads of really nice work from those sessions – some of which include those pesky little flowers…

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Six Go Wild in Currabinny Woods

Clearly I’m not a believer in the old motto ‘never work with kids’.

Why would you not work with them when there’s so much fun to be had.

The thing about photographing kids of any age is to realise that they generally won’t do what you want – they’ll do what they want.  Which is only a problem if you want them to ‘sit still and smile’.

But if you want them to go out and be themselves, doing what they want is all you can wish for.

You just have to be able to capture it in all a photograph!

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News on Gallery Sessions

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Gallery Sessions last year were a big hit: a convienient way to get a great range of pictures of a whole family at a reasonable cost (and with no initial outlay).

But me, being me, couldn’t help messing with the format a bit.

It’s no news that I’m not a fan of flat backgrounds.  I started a blog post about that very subject and it turned into a small essay – so we’ll have to work out where to go with that one at some stage.

But these are studio sessions and we need a background.  So we chose something less ‘photographery’ and flat with more texture and deliberately set it up so it wasn’t smooth.  The to help I tilted it to give some depth.

But at times the purple backdrop came up very dark and a bit flat last year – even when I started lighting it independently.  So we looked at other options: more depth, more options for posing full length, better lit and more space for larger groups.

My motto would always to ‘use what you have’ first and by turning everything around and incorporating the Gallery partion we hit on something new and way more interesting.  Moreover shooting into the angle adds more depth.

It’s deeper, brighter and gives options for leaning against the partion.  You get good separation with darker clothes and taller people in the group and we have extra seats, stools and other props this year to make more interesting group setups.

First Live Session with the new backdrop
First Live Session with the new backdrop

Just to finally add those links to the Communion information:

Communion and Confirmation Sessions
Communion and Confirmation Packages

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Angel on the Bedstead

St Patrick’s Weekend meant two things for us this year: both girls in the Parade; and the chance for three lie-ins in a row.

It’s been a busy few weeks for all of us and we definitely needed some time to re-charge the batteries.

Thankfully our kids are now old enough to get themselves up and get started at the weekends, which leaves us an extra few zzz’s.

And on Monday morning I woke to find an Angel at the bottom of my bed:

'Everything looks better in Black and White'

Middle Child has been somewhat absent from these pages lately.  Don’t worry, you’ll see much more of her as her Communion approaches…

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Communion Studio Sessions

Following the success of last year’s Studio sessions in the Gallery on Communion Days, we’re offering the same packages again this year.

These sessions are designed to be a convienient way to drop in to the Gallery on the day of your child’s First Communion.  They last around 10 minutes and there is no session fee.

Ten minutes doesn’t sound like a lot but you’ll get a range of images of everyone you bring into the Gallery that day.  Of course we’ll get a range of solo portraits of your son or daughter on their day.  But there is also time to get pictures with their siblings, grandparent, godparents and don’t forget the parents of course.

There are only a number of 10 minute slots available on each Saturday in May so it’s best to enquire as early as possible if this is something that would suit you and your family.

The panel below gives a good idea of the range of images from a session last year.  I’ve also posted more information about the different kinds of sessions and the package prices but feel free to call in to get more info.

Gallery sessions will also be available for Confirmation sessions in most of the local schools.  Contact us for more.

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More on smiles

I’ve just finished re-reading Annie Leibovitz’s ‘At Work’.  I’m a big fan and I went back to it looking for ‘January Inspiration’.  Unusually (for me) it’s a photography book with more words than pictures but it’s her perspective on her work that I find most enlightening.

So there’s a few things that I want to mull over and a few references to work that inspired her that I need to follow up.

But there’s one quote that was immediately relevant to my previous post:

“There are not many smiling people in my pictures.  I’ve never asked anyone to smile.  Almost never … You can almost hear the sigh of relief when you tell someone they don’t have to smile.

“…The smile is a component of family pictures.  Mothers don’t want to see their children looking unhappy.  My mother would hire a local photographer to make a family portrait and he would inevitably ask us all to smile.  Forced.  In the fifties, everything was supposed to be OK, although half the time it wasn’t OK.  It took me years to understand that I equated asking someone to smile with asking them to do something false.

“There are people who smile naturally.  It’s their temperament.  And you can catch a smile that is spontaneous, of the moment.  My daughter Sarah has the most beautiful smile.  When you see it occurring so naturally in children you hate to see it lost. I crumbled inside one day when I saw Sarah fake a smile.”

There’s a contrast in the observation that mother’s require smiling pictures of their kids to prove everything is OK and the love she shares with all of us of our own child’s natural smile.

So the objective of a family photographer is to capture those natural, spontaneous smiles and not the fake ones.  Often these smiles are reactive.  It’s a big part of what I do to try and produce those reactions and capture then, no matter how fleeting they are.  This isn’t easy but we always get something. The hardest part is to get a reaction from more than one child in a family group.

She smiles too
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A Child’s Perspective

My Sister's Rainbow Shiny Iggy

In some respects I deal in Happy Faces.

It is a simple truth that the pictures that sell are the happy, smiley-face pictures – and we go to great lengths at times to get them.  I think that’s fair enough: photographs are permanent memories.  We want to remember ourselves in our best, happiest times.  Photographs of those we love smiling make us happy.

Great photography invokes a strong emotional response from the viewer.

On that count this photograph definitely does it for me.  It fills me with a father’s Love and Compassion more than most of the images I’ve taken recently.  It does it to me every time I see it.

This is a picture of my eldest daughter on the day her sister got ‘the best packet of Moshi Monster cards ever’ and she got a pack of very ordinary ones.

And I can assure you at this point that hugs were administered, feelings were acknowledged, but the general perspective of things wasn’t lost.  It’s just a pack of collector cards.  There will be other packs.  She is your sister.  I know that doesn’t help much right now.  I know that you’re doing your best to do the right thing.  I know it still hurts.  I love you.

I think she doesn’t really like that I love this image.  I know she doesn’t want me to think of her like this because it isn’t representative of her overall persona.  It is a snapshot of an instant of sadness.  I was even reluctant to put it up here because, beautiful and evocative as it is, it’s not representative of the general character of her personality or my professional work.

In fact I only took it to try and distract her into helping me scout this room as a possible location for a very different portrait.  But since she also just made the ‘front page‘ with a more representative image then I think at the moment it’s OK.

Photography is capable of capturing the full gamut of human emotion.  We most frequently use it to capture the joy of family life and that is most definitely what I specialise in.  But there must be a place for remembering the rest of our everyday human experience.