My wife recently decided that we needed some new photographs of the girls to send to family in Europe. I am not the family photographer and so we hired a professional who specializes in children photography. We dressed them up in their matching spring dresses and took them to Sherwood Gardens in Baltimore, which is a beautiful place at this time of the year with several varieties of tulip in full bloom. I decided that I would tag along behind the photographer with my small, unobtrusive Olympus EP3 to see if I could maybe sneak a few shots and learn some of the secrets about taking photographs of kids (one five and the other just turned three) who cannot stand still for more than a few seconds – I soon learned that one of the best tactics is to simply take lots and lots of photos and hope for the best.
The day was a little overcast, which gave perfect lighting, especially for shooting under trees – to prevent “dappling”. I managed to capture a few shots that Grandma would be pleased with, including the following:
However, while the photographer was getting the girls set up to take more “pretty shots” I saw an opportunity to take some candid photographs in between the shots she was planning to take. These were the moments when the girls were simply being themselves. They were not being forced to smile and were not being posed. They were simply lost in their own thoughts and imagination, which was amazing to see. It reminded me of when I was a young child growing up in the countryside of North East England, when I would just wander for hours, exploring the fields and forests that surrounded our village. As I have stated in several earlier post, I firmly believe that every image we create says as much about us as it does the subject, and in the case of portrait photography I believe that we project our own personality into that of the person we are photographing. I had this and my own childhood memories in mind when I created these images. Although these are not the kind of images that will end up on Grandma’s wall I actually prefer them to the “pretty shots” because they remind me of who my kids really are and also take me back to my own childhood.
