I’m always interested in reading what other photographers have to say. To be perfectly honest a lot of them don’t make a bag of sense but sometimes you find something that resonates with your own personal experience and expresses it in a way that you can’t.
“Photography is one percent talent and ninety-nine percent moving furniture”
Attributed to Arnold Newman by Annie Leibovitz.
There’s loads of these on Photography Quotations. Generally I don’t have the time and patience to go through this site to look for stuff but it’s handy to check something (I can’t stand mis-quotes). This one isn’t there though so we’ll have to trust Annie.
Vouchers are also available for confirmation gifts
Your child’s Confirmation day certainly isn’t as big a day as their First Communion but it is not less important as a milestone in their lives.
In fact in many respects it is more significant because it coincides with a major transition in their lives: the move to senior school.
Now my kids aren’t there yet – this is all ahead of them – but I’m assured that things change considerably once they move on from National School. It’s not just that they are teenagers, their peer group is now exclusively other teenagers. It’s a time of change and many challenges.
What I have seen is that kids in 6th class still behave like kids in front of the camera. They don’t yet wear that protective shell of self-conciousness that many teenagers grow. They are open, relaxed, comfortable in themselves and photographs taken for their confirmation have a unique blend of confidence and innocence.
So although your child’s confirmation is probably going to be a low-key event compared to their communion, that doesn’t mean that it should go unmarked. You may not be planning a large family get-together, a bouncy castle and a big party, but think about getting photographs taken professionally.
There are a number of things you might consider:
Sessions are available at the Gallery on the day of the Confirmation. There’s no charge for the session, it takes about 10 minutes and you’ll get a range of studio images with the rest of the family
If you’re going on to a Hotel or Restaurant after Mass then I can meet you there.
I can come to your home either before you leave or if you’re celebrating at home afterwards.
We can arrange a session on another date if that suits better. This allows a more flexible and relaxed session with a wider range of images possible.
Generally there is more availability for confirmations because they are weekdays and schools don’t coincide but some dates are very busy for sessions. So contact us now to discuss your child’s confirmation and let us capture it in a unique way.
It’s over. It’s offcially been handed in. Good luck to whoever is marking them.
The History Project has become a major part of our lives over the last few weeks: any spare time we thought we had has gone to it; the combined resources of four families have been devoted to it.
In fairness they all did really well. They learned a small slice of local history and they learned a lot about organising themselves as a team.
Our lot decided to do a video instead a model and true-to-form what might have been a documentary became a drama production. A big thanks to Hugh for doing a great job with the video but it fell to me to produce a cover shot.
So inspired by my recent reading I went for something slightly more ‘conceptual’ than my normal stuff. I even dragged out the studio backdrop and the strobes for it! The girls were very expressive (and patient) models and we had a bit of fun with the courtroom drama idea – whilst keeping the original home-grown costumes. We even shot a circular concept shot for the DVD label!
I’m quite pleased with it. It’s good to have to think of something different for a specific purpose. And while I much prefer location work for most of what I do, there are times when you need something more abstract.
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.
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.
We made a good start to 2012 by finally managing to make it to a Bishopstown Orienteering Club day out in Currabinny. It’s something Mrs Lamb has been wanting to do for ages and thanks to friends we made it on 1/1/12.
Great to be out in the woods after a restful Christmas and finding the markers on the easy course was great fun with the kids (and got them round the forest way easier).
The Last Control
It was unusal to see the woods so bare. I normally do a few sessions in these woods over the course of the year and this tree in particular is a favourite to get kids climbing and used to me and the camera. It’s normally ‘bright shade’ with a strong green colour cast from the reflected light from the forest but there was no problem with that on Sunday!
I don’t hold with New Year Resolutions on the whole. Why try to be good in January just because you let yourself go a bit in December?
However normally it’s a bit quieter in January following the rush to get things out before the hols in December and it is a good time to dust of the plans and update them for 2012.
So here’s my list (in no particular order):
More photos on the blog (and less shameless self publicity)
Expand the whole web presence a bit more – keep an eye out for this one – generally more info and more pics and more about what to expect from a family session (using examples and more images)
More Wedding stuff on the main web site
I need to move on some personal projects as well. Lots of ideas that haven’t seen the light of day. This stuff is good for the grey matter at this time of year.
I’ll also be updating the Marketing Plan in the next few weeks so there’ll be more promos and stuff coming up.
A small re-fresh of some of the Gallery Artwork
Read more books
Spend more time looking at other photographer’s work – both famous and not so – more inspiration and education here too
I might take on some education myself as well. There have been some requests for more info / courses / tips and stuff. I did some ICA talks last year and I’ve a general tips page on the blog but it could do with an update.
