Embrace the Chaos

A photographer-friend asked a question in a forum: How do you get the kids to sit still and look at the camera? Forum answers usually involved bribery, silly faces or loud noises. But my favorite answer was basically this: forget about the smile-for-the-camera shot. Instead, “Embrace the chaos!” These are the pictures that tell the real story of your family-with-young-kids anyway! See below for more from Marisa and RJ’s family lifestyle photographs.

If you’d like to see their sweet slide show, post a comment or send me a message. Love the one above. In my own family when I was a child, the youngest (that would be me) was almost never photographed, which is partly why I’m a family lifestyle photographer: I help people remember to get as many baby pictures of the littlest ones as they did of the older ones when they were little.

The baby’s older sister was my test model for the family shots. She did a great job!

The baby’s older brother loves to watch slide shows. I’m so happy I got this great picture of his handsome smile.

Love this!

That’s a great kitchen for black and white pictures. I look at pictures like this and it makes me want to go find the pictures of my kids back so long ago when they were sitting in high chairs.

This one makes me remember back when Bradley used to run across the kitchen and jump into my arms, and then I would flip him upside down. We did that almost every day for years. Wish I had a picture of that. He’s 6-foot-3 now; there won’t be any more jumping into mommy’s arms!

I thought about trying to remove the hair across her forehead, but decided I actually like it there for the interesting shape it forms.

FAVE! I love shots of the baby crawling across the floor in only a diaper! Especially if she’s crawling toward big-brother’s room, where she’s likely to find trouble. So much going on in that picture that makes me think. I love pictures like that.

FAVE! I love how this image captures that innocent time when it’s fun to pretend to be the mommy.

This is such a sweet moment. I’m so glad I captured it for Marisa. It makes me think that I should run a workshop for families to help the NON-photographer of the family know how to take some nice point-and-shoot pictures of the photographer of the family. Isn’t there always one person in the family who is always the one taking the pictures? And that person is never in any of the family albums? So — dad — if that’s you — if MOM is the one always taking the pictures, either hire ME, or grab the camera from mom once in a while, ok?

LOVE this headshot!

Love these of Marisa playing with the baby.

Aren’t they cute together?

This one of daddy playing with his baby girl is sweet too.

Bath time!

I LOVE the colors in that bathroom!

This shot of the girl playing with a truck reminds me of my childhood. I love this picture.

But she insisted I also take a shot of her favorite toy.

Awwwwww! I love it!

Love this one too — just a little cuddling with mommy.

And then he wanted some pictures of his toys too.

And a little cuddling with mom is always a good idea because she’ll love this picture forever!

But this may be my all-time favorite — a picture of one of my Wonder Years clients watching one of their old slide shows with her daughter on her lap. (And that’s their keepsake disk of images on the table too! I love this picture so much.)

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