Capturing Joy

I need need NEED to take more photos. And, they need to be good ones too. There is too much growing up happening around here and I am not capturing enough of it. Of course, I have no good excuses for this but I have some explanations.

For example, I took plenty of photos of Aaron but while I did that, I always felt that the camera was getting in the way of enjoying the moment. Oh quick, where's the camera? He's so cute. I hope he keeps doing that for 5 seconds longer. So, I end up with the photo but I didn't get to fully enjoy whatever the moment was. With Adrian, there is the added hurdle of him wanting to be photographed, but only posing for 0.5seconds and then running over to take a look at the result. I think I need some sort of spy cam to capture anything!

Recently, I attended a 30 minute talk by a photographer on capturing joy. It was the teaser to his three hour course. I'd love to attend but as usual, I'll be talking myself out of it. There are probably plenty of ideas floating around the internet on how to take better photos.

Since listening to that teaser, I have been trying to put the two points I remember into practice. The first is to go in as close as possible and the second is to have people's heads touching if possible.

So, I looked through some of our photos and did some cropping. Even looking through weeks and weeks of photos, I only came up with a handful of decent shots.

Aaron and I had a great time when this photo was taken but I couldn't crop it any more because his tongue kept throwing the balance off if I went too close.





I think this one worked much better.





I also tried making them put their heads together today.





I want to get good at this but right now, the thing that is jumping out at me is that cropping makes snotty noses more obvious!