I've always thought I became a photographer because I hate having my picture taken. I learned early on that if I was holding the camera I'd rarely have to be in front of it... However, after documenting so many other families over the past few years, we started to think about wanting photos of this pregnancy to have in the years to come.
Our cameras have wifi remote shooting, which means we can set up a tripod then use our phones to see what the camera can see and to control the settings and shutter, so we figured we'd try taking some photos ourselves and see how they came out!
While taking our own photos wasn't the easiest, the more we did it the more we enjoyed it. Also, being on the other side of the camera really opened our eyes to how our clients feel during a shoot!
We started out taking some photos up at Lake Monomonac in New Hampshire during sunrise. Sunrise there is so beautiful, and I had an idea in my head of a photo to do with Gatsby. He was a willing(ish) participant for about 60 seconds, and Brian managed to snag a few nice shots before Gatsby had had enough of the early morning photo shoot and ran off to find some sticks.
He waited "patiently" while Brian and I got a couple shots of the two of us...
And then he told us in no uncertain terms that it was time for Gatbsy playtime to begin. He jumped up on the dock and placed a stick squarely between the legs of our tripod, which was holding the camera on the edge of the dock. He then sat next to it and said in dog language "you have 15 seconds before I lunge for that stick and your camera falls in the lake."
Our next attempt at photos was up in Acadia, one of our favorite places.
While helping other people pose comes pretty naturally to us, posing ourselves turned out to be harder than it looked!
We kept practicing once we got back to NY, hitting up some of our favorite spots to photograph families and couples. Brian did the bulk of the set-up at this point since baby boy was rapidly growing, and running back and forth to a camera was harder and harder for me... I then had the oh-so-difficult job of waiting around and standing in one place so he could test light and different shots.
Not a bad place to stand around...
or sit around...
even if it was a little cold...
and if it took a lot of tries of shooting a scene then using our phones to time the pose and shutter just right...
I might hate having my photo taken, but I am so happy to have these images as a record of this special time in our lives :)
Here are the final products!
