The Mom Photo Syndrome

In our family, I'm usually the one behind the camera. Whenever I see a moment happening that I want to preserve, I grab my camera and snap it. From birthday parties, to moments of sweetness between daughters or daughter and dog, I am often taking photos of the family.

The day we got Beauty.

Sisterly silliness at the apple orchard this fall.

Recently I've been working to clean up our photo library, which is constantly growing and, outside of being in chronological order, is difficult to search.

Luckily iPhoto has a facial recognition feature and has you tag people, so then you can search for people by their faces. It makes it really handy if you're looking for photos of someone for a graduation collage...not that I'm thinking about that already (gulp).

I started with my kids, the most infamous and photographed members of our family.

iPhoto identified more than 1,000 potential photos of each of them. It took quite some time to go through them, clicking on the ones that were indeed each child,  rejecting or correctly identifying those who were actually other people. For the most part the software had it right.

Then I worked on photos of my husband -- there were 540 photos of him, usually with the girls. The software was usually right too, though every once in a while it picked my stepdad, often in later years when Wayne's hair was more the color of Mark's.

Finally, I worked on my own photos, of which there were only 123, most of which were not correct  because my sister, sister-in-law and daughter all look a lot like me, so of those photos I re-tagged them with the appropriate person.

Screenshot of working through photos of "Jenny," 50% of which are wrong.

123 photos over the past 15 or so years. Sure, it's a lot of photos, but it's a fraction of the photos we have. I want my girls to look back on their childhood and know how happy both their parents were to spend time with them (and that we did). Sometimes photos are what trigger the memory - what will our girls remember about an event when the same person is always absent from it in photos? Although I do usually make my involvement in their lives pretty memorable, as time goes by photographs become the proof.

So I'm committed to making sure I'm in more photos. I never was a "selfie" person, so I'll be handing the camera to my husband or my kids more often, to capture more of life's moments with me in them.

Before-work selfie.

Picture Day

Around here, every day is picture day.

Our girls are accustomed to my pulling out my camera about every other day. They make their own videos on our iPad. They mug and preen and pose.

But today was picture day at school, not at home, and that made it special.

Lindsey made a check list last night of things to do to get ready for it: Set alarm. Get dressed. Comb hair.

Marissa, on the other hand, picked out her clothes the night before and slept until 7:38 so that she would be well rested for her big photo shoot. We let Marissa wear a fancy dress that she's wanted to wear to school other days but we don't let her.

Of course, I had to take pictures before the pictures, because the girls made such an occasion of this day.

I can't wait to see if the actual pictures turned out.

My New Toy

I've been thinking. Wishing. Researching. Calculating. Dreaming.

You know, all the things we do when considering a new toy, an expensive toy. And this past weekend, Wayne and I went out and made the purchase.

I am now the proud owner of a Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera. I've already found some awesome features that I love but have a lot more learning to do.

I've tried to take some more artistic photos in the past year. Living around the lakes in Minneapolis and raising two little girls, I have lots of scenes and subject matter that don't need much help to make them beautiful. But I've been frustrated in wanting to take more artistic photos of my subject matter or wanting to focus in on one element of a scene, but my camera hasn't allowed me to.

So now I get to play some more and capture more of my girls' childhood in pictures.

Hopefully you won't find my pictures on this site.

http://youarenotaphotographer.com/


Not sure where I am on this graph - I hope nowhere.