Photo Shoot Bloopers

Ah, the classic cheesy grins.  Brought to you by Mommy's mistakes... I did it to myself by laughing when they started it.  Now there's no going back.  When Lily uses her new kiddie camera she always says "Cheese".

At Jen's advice I am trying to learn how to take good portraits of my two built-in-models.  Which is great for everyone, cause the extended family just gobbles the pictures up and I get to learn what works and what doesn't work when trying to photograph two moving objects that are constantly CHEESING.

And I get some really fun bloopers along the way...

I love this one!  Lily, "Ugh, MOOOOOM.  Seriously?"  Sam, "Hey look!  It's a bird, it's a plane!"  

When I look at this one all I can think of is that one day I'm going to have two teenage girls.  And they'll probably give me these exact looks.

Oops again... this blooper is another one that's my fault.  In an effort to keep Sam (Miss Wiggly-Do-Da) in the frame, I'll say things like "Lily give Sam a hug!" which she interprets to mean "Lily give Sam the choke-hold!"

This one's pretty fantastic.  Don't ya hate it when you're eating candy and you feel a cough coming on?

The Thing 1 and Thing 2 photo shoot is definitely one of the best so far.  I was feeling a little stressed about it because I wanted so badly to have good pictures of those costumes that took me SO LONG TO MAKE!  And I was afraid that they wouldn't cooperate.  And I knew that I wouldn't be able to do them outside, so I'd have to use window light.

So I read a couple of really good articles online about photographing kids.  This gal has a fantastic philosophy about being real with photography.

It was a huge "duh" moment for me to read that you don't have to have the kids smiling, or even looking at the camera to get an authentic image.  Totally took off the pressure of "posing" them properly.  Instead I just focused on capturing them having fun!

So yeah, I got a lot of shots of one or both of them out of focus because they were in motion... but setting up the spare crib mattress on the floor of our spare room was perfect.  Because they  had a "spot" to be, so there was less of me begging that they stay put.

And giving them candy was just a no-brainer.  This picture illustrates the sugar comas that I induced.  I often think to use candy when shooting the girls, except before reading the articles, I would have just used the candy as bribery to get them to cooperate.  But in this shoot, I used it as a prop and I had so much fun getting pictures of them digging right in to some of their Halloween loot!

I'm looking forward to getting better with my little models... coming up with new ways to have fun as I document their little smiles.  No "cheese" allowed!