What to focus on

My sister is a professional photographer in Ontario, Canada and while she grew her business largely on wedding shoots, lately she has been doing a lot more lifestyle photography, especially working to grow her portfolio with newborn shoots. I've been watching her instagram feed and getting inspired. I started to think about taking pictures of my boys the way she does with her clients: pictures that are beautifully styled, clean, soft, precious.

So I pulled out my camera one day when the sun was mostly out (a rare thing here in Michigan in February!) and the lighting was nice in our home. Initially looking through my lens the scene did not look great. It looked cluttered. Mostly because the room was cluttered. Coincidentally I was in the same room where my sister, a year before, had taken some of my maternity pictures. I started thinking about what she did to make my pictures look so nice. Where did she stand? How did she hold the angle? How did she style the scene?

Then I remembered helping her push all the crap in the room to one side so it would be out of the picture. I got up and moved a few things, moved the babies closer to the nice window light, and tried a few different angles.

I was delighted by the images on my viewfinder now!

I carried on like that over the next few hours, choosing my favorite parts of the day, pushing all the crap in each scene aside and capturing a lovely photo, a beautiful memory.

I know some people think that it's "fake" when we style pictures like this, without all the normal household crap- broken toys, three rolls of duct tape, a dead plant, the mountainous laundry pile waiting to be folded, the spray bottle of windex and crumpled up paper towel beside it- is hidden from the shot. (These are all real things I moved out of the way when I was taking these pictures.)

But I actually think these "cleaned up" photos are truer to life in that they are more like our real memories.

Even now when I think back to my earliest days of parenting after bringing our son Arie home from Russia, I remember watching him crawl under our table to pet our cat, the way his eye lashes stuck together in the bath, the long sluuuuurping noise he made when he ate his soup. My memories are focused on the important parts. I guarantee when he was under the table, there were piles of something or another on top. When he was in the bath I had one clean pair of pajamas in hand and four others crumpled up in our yet-to-be-emptied suitcase somewhere else in the house. As he slurped his soup I'm sure we had a pile of dishes in the sink, spills on the counter, and burned on spills on our stove.

I know the ratio of twins to Arie photos here is lacking.
Arie is 1) at school all day and
2) so OVER Mom taking his picture all the time. ;-) 

I'm making an educated guess at those background details because only four years later I don't remember any of them.

It's kind of freeing to think about life this way. There's a metaphor in there somewhere: there will always be crap. Don't be afraid to push it out of the way to make a memory. The crap is not what matters in the frame. Its the people.

Those precious, darling people.

Focus on them.

xo