From there to here, from here to there, Funny things are everywhere
Maybe it’s because I’m a big sister myself, but there is something about this photo that I love – big sister and baby brother in the flower garden. I knew from the moment the shutter clicked that it would be a keeper.
We had lots of more formal poses with mom and dad and the kids, but it’s these little in-between moments that often end up being my favourites. Sunshine, flowers, cute kids, and friendly people? I can’t think of a better recipe for a lovely Saturday morning.
How much do you love this little guy’s toothy smile?
Isnt’ he cute? Lookit that twinkle in his eye. He came with his folks for family portraits on the porch last week, and since he’ll be starting his very first day at school in September, I thought it would be an excellent time to pull out the vintage school desk I picked up for a song last year. I love that moment when I feel like I’ve connected with a shy subject and their personality shines out.
I’m happy to incorporate back to school poses as part of my porch portrait sessions this autumn. I’ve got stacks of vintage books and a few fresh apples to complete the look! Spots always book up quickly in the autumn (whimper – summer, I hardly knew ya!) so please do get in touch soon if you’d like to book your family’s portraits.
Despite having most of the last five years with a camera stuck to my face, I haven’t yet managed to take a photo of my parents that I love. Until this weekend, that is. We’ve been spending the weekend with my brother and his family, and it’s been crowded, chaotic, silly and wonderful, so it makes perfect sense to honour all the shenanigans with the people who made it all possible.
Of course, to get this lovely portrait of our patriarch and matriarch, I had to put up with them trying to throw each other in the lake and sticking out their tongues like two year olds, but that itself says a lot about my family.
At least now you see where I get it from. 😉
This photo session for a colleague and his family was supposed to take place on Father’s Day, but we got rained out. Today was a perfectly perfect day for pictures, though, and you couldn’t ask for three funnier, kinder or more patient subjects for family portraits!
Adorable, right? They were wonderfully patient with my ideas and let me boss them around a hike that only got us a little bit lost. This was my absolute favourite kind of family portrait session: casual, playful, and with lots and lots of laughter.
Kind, funny and photogenic, too – I can’t wait to show you more photos from this fun afternoon!
Hooray! Another portrait season launched and the porch is officially open for business. I had a visit yesterday from this adorable twosome – look at those sparkly eyes!
They were just the perfect mix of sweet and shy with a wee hint of sassy. And oh those matching dresses! I’m sure I’ll be sharing more of this session once I finish sorting through the photos.
Weekend bookings are filling up quickly, so if you’re interested in playful summer portraits of your family, please get in touch soon!
Isn’t it funny when the random bits of your life come together in a cohesive way?
Toward the end of February, my friend Yvonne mentioned she was doing something called Hot Power Yoga Basics, and I was intrigued. I’d done yoga classes at the local community centre on and off way back in the day, but I liked the idea of something more physically challenging and strength building like power yoga. I’ve been going to the class every Thursday evening since the beginning of March and I’ve been really enjoying it – when I am not cursing it. The cursing usually comes about 40 hours after the class when my muscles lock up from the exertion, but even that is a good sort of pain. I’m hoping to be leaner and stronger and a little less unbalanced [insert your own joke here] in a couple of months if I keep it up.
By sheer coincidence, within days of my return to yoga I happened to receive an e-mail from Glenda at Ottawa Corporate Yoga. She was looking to commission a photographer to help her develop a set of cards to accompany bedtime yoga workshop that Glenda offers with a special focus on kids who have sleep disorders or anxiety issues. I loved the idea of the project from the start, and the fact that designer on the project would be the fabulous Lynn Jatania was the icing on the cake.
Here’s one of my favourite poses from the session. It’s called Lizard on a Rock, and it’s being demonstrated by Glenda and her adorable daughter.
I can’t wait to see how the final project turns out!
Hey Yvonne, you want to try this one out at yoga class tonight? I get dibs on the top position!
Did you see?? The sun came out AND it was above minus 20 today. It was practically summer!! We celebrated with a walk on one of our favourite Ottawa trails, and were delighted by the number of animals who came out to say hello: pileated woodpeckers, nuthatches and chickadees, a merlin, a few playful red squirrels and then, to our delight, a big fat porcupine came sauntering up the trail beside us.
(I did not zoom in for this – in fact, I had to back up to get him in the frame as the porcupine sauntered past us!)
It was a gorgeous afternoon out, made even more delicious by the recent spate of miserable cold.
If you’re interested, I’d love to do a few sessions of winter portraits out there before the snow melts and the trails get muddy. For any weekend in March, I’ll offer a spring thaw discount if you’d like to do a “feed the chickadees” family portrait hike at the Jack Pine Trail – $150 for the session fee, and you only buy whatever prints or files you want. Prices are listed on my photo site.
I’ll even bring the bird seed!
So far this winter, Ottawa has managed to dodge the snow that has been less merciful to southern Ontario and especially to our friends in the Maritime provinces. It has, however, been brutally, relentlessly cold.
When the temperatures crept up within a few degrees of the freezing mark, I took advantage of the opportunity to walk the boys home from school, and then we stopped to play in the snow for a while rather than rush into the house.
Winter can be beautiful if you give it a chance! I have lots of availability for weekend family portraits in the snow, if you want to come out and play. 🙂
So this is a fun story. Back in the fall, I was contacted through Flickr about using one of my photos of Watson’s Mill in Manotick. It’s one of my favourite photos, but as I’ve assigned my licensing rights to Getty Images, I can’t license it privately. I explained that to the person contacting me, and gave them the link to license it directly from Getty. This happens fairly often, and I’d say about one time in ten the buyer actually pursues the license with Getty.
In this instance, for whatever reason they weren’t interested in following up with Getty and asked if I had any other photos that were a “recognizable landmark of Ottawa west.” As you know, I have a few (cough) photos of the Mill kicking around, so I sent them a few images. They liked one that wasn’t represented by Getty and licensed it directly from me. Goodbye middleman, hello 100% profits!
And that’s how my photo of Watson’s Mill ended up on the cover of the 2015 Ottawa West edition of the Yellow Pages directory!
Fun, right? Okay, okay, so the actual paper version of the Yellow Pages directory is almost completely obsolete and is slowly being phased out. I had to explain to the boys what the Yellow Pages directory even was, and how important it was back in the days before Google. Do you remember how important you felt the first time YOUR name was printed in the phone book? I don’t know exactly when we stopped receiving ours, but I used to check every year when it came out to see my name in print. I’m tickled to see one of my photos used on this vanishing bit of history!
Even more fun, when I was driving home from work tonight, I could see a copy of the Yellow Pages at the end of the driveway for all the houses on our street:
This makes me laugh, because for years I’ve used “about as exciting as getting your name published in the phone book” as a yardstick of micro-fame. Now getting your photo on the COVER of the phone book, that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
And now you’ll know what I’m up to if you see me rifling through everyone’s recycling bins on the next garbage day. Autographed vanity copies for EVERYONE! 🙂
I am still chuckling over the irony in the post I wrote back in 2006 about getting our family portraits done at the local grocery store studio. That was the last time I was ever in a big box store studio, for good reason.
Nine years later, I’ve learned a thing or two about portraits. While my “mommy goggles” love the subjects of these portraits, which made me love the portraits themselves, I can’t help but pick out some significant faults that make me cringe when I look at the finished product, some more egregious than others. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?
Ten things that are wrong with these portraits:
1. That backdrop
Seriously? It’s stained. It’s wrinkled. It’s AWFUL. And that colour? Is that brown or grey or khaki or what? I remember having the choice between this and a stark white and some sort of 70s inspired print, and this was the best of the three. It’s the stains that kill me, though. They completely detract from the portrait subjects. This is a “professional” portrait studio – at least have some not-filthy backdrops, for goodness sake.
2. The seam in the background
See that seam running down the middle of the background? First of all, it shouldn’t be there AT ALL. There’s a reason the most popular background you can buy for your studio is called “seamless”. And while it would be distracting anywhere in the frame, it’s horrible that the seam runs directly down the centre, effectively cutting the family in half. It would have taken just a few seconds and a critical eye to slide that out of the way. Better yet, a larger aperture and moving the subjects forward a bit would throw the (really really awful) background pleasantly out of focus. Backgrounds should either be complementary or practically invisible and certainly not so obvious – that curtain and its seams and stains and folds draws all the attention away from the portrait subjects, and also makes us look rather slovenly.
3. The posing
While I forgot that I wrote this blog post, I haven’t forgotten the actual experience of having the portraits taken. We received no direction about posing ourselves AT ALL. I had grabbed Simon and pretty much dropped myself into the photo, leaning in a bit to see past him. By fluke, our heads line up to make a moderately pleasing diagonal line, but look how unflattering that pose is for me, from the tension in my extended hand to the way I almost disappear leaning between the boys. I wasn’t posing, I was acting as a human corral trying to keep Simon in the picture. A photographer’s job is to give advice to the models about posing for flattering body shapes and pleasing composition and to capture family dynamics, not to simply activate the shutter once all the required bodies are inside the frame.
4. The outfits
Okay, mea culpa. I can own this one. It’s only been in the last two or three years that I’ve really come to understand how to dress a family for portraits. In this case, I had simply dressed everyone in their favourite outfits without really thinking about pulling everyone’s outfits together for a cohesive look. I’m not talking about dressing everyone in white shirts and jeans, either – we were close with the shades of blue in Beloved’s shirt and jeans and the blue strip in Tristan’s shirt and my blue jeans – but the colours in Simon’s outfit aren’t echoed anywhere else and my stark white t-shirt is a little too plain. The electric blue toes on Tristan’s socks keep yanking my attention to his feet and away from his face. Our outfits are not at all harmonized; coordinated outfits would have helped pull us together as a group.
This is what I’ve learned about dressing the family for portraits: coordinate the family’s outfits together in the same way you’d coordinate an outfit for yourself. Go for mostly complimentary neutrals and choose one colour (or two, if you’re bold!) to run as an accent through the outfits. Maybe mostly blues and cool greys with an orange strip in dad’s shirt, an orange scarf on mom, a warm yellow pinstripe in daughter’s plaid skirt and an orange t-shirt underneath a grey shirt on junior. Or something similar. You don’t have to be matchy-matchy, but you should consider everyone’s individual pieces of clothing as part of one big family outfit.
5. Cropped limbs
See how my leg is cut off right at the knee? See what it does to my leg? Just call me stumpy. There’s an old rule in photography that you never cut off a limb at the joint. If you must crop, and you should try whenever possible to avoid cropping limbs like this at all, cut in mid-bone. On the other side, the crop on Beloved’s leg is better, but I would have worked harder to ensure the entire family was whole with a bit of room to breathe on the sides for good measure. Same with the picture of Tristan and Simon – see how Tristan’s jeans tangent the edge of the frame, but there’s room on the other side between the edge of the frame and Simon?
6. Tristan not looking
It’s hard photographing excitable toddlers. Trust me, I know this. However, it’s the photographer’s job to WORK to ensure that the kids are actually looking at the camera, if that’s the goal of the portrait. If I need to take five snaps and do a head swap to get all the kids looking into the camera, that’s what I’ll do. It looks awkward and unbalanced to have one kid looking and one not. (And it would have been so much nicer had the photographer suggested the boys have some sort of contact or interaction with each other in that photo of the two of them instead of having them look like they were randomly plunked there, which is actually what happened – Beloved and I each dropped a boy on the rock and stepped back and SNAP.)
7. No attention to detail
I’d’ve loved it if the photographer took a second to tell me that Simon’s pants were riding up his legs like that, so I could tug them down. And all that crumpled leftover backdrop going every which way in the foreground is really distracting. It could have been smoothed and straightened in two seconds. As it is, both compete for attention with our faces.
8. The props
A big styrofoam rock? What’s a rock doing in a studio portrait anyway? You know I love props in my own portraits – wagons and apple boxes and cute kid-sized furniture. But this just doesn’t make any sense to me. I know I chose it – but it doesn’t help tell any sort of story, or contribute anything to the photo. It’s jarringly out of place. A nice bench or stool or even a crate would have made more sense.
9. The lack of direction
The photographer gave us no direction at all. I would have been grateful for suggestions about posing, props, or even any attempt to interact with the kids beyond looking bored and impatient when they acted like the two- and four-year-olds they were. I admit, I tend to err on the side of pushy during a portrait session, but I think direction is the job of the photographer, not the subject. The photographer should absolutely listen to the input of the subjects – they’re the customer, after all – but at the end of the day, being a photographer is about more than just pushing the button.
10. The abject lack of creativity
I get it. These are high-volume, low-budget operations. The idea is to get people in and out as quickly as possible: line ’em up, take the photos, get ’em out. But there’s no story here, and there are so many ways to elicit reactions that will result in a capture of the family’s personality and dynamic: have the subjects touch each other, have them look at each other, make them laugh by telling a corny knock-knock joke (I got a million of ’em!) or asking who has the stinkiest feet in the family, ask dad to tickle one of the kids, tell mom and dad to kiss and watch the kids react… or just change up the poses a little bit, so everyone is feeling less stiff and anxious in front of the camera. Zoom in, zoom out, shoot from anywhere except dead-on straight.
What we have here is a picture, but not a portrait, and while it’s us, it doesn’t really show who we are.
What do you think? Are my expectations too high? Am I being overly critical? I mean, it took me five years of running my own portrait business to develop all of these skills, so should I be expecting them from someone who is probably told to get behind the camera, don’t touch the settings, and sell as big a package as possible while still getting the clients in and out as quickly as possible? Have you had similar or opposite experiences with grocery store or department store photo studios?