Taking Photos of Your Children

A quick post for new parents about taking photos of their children. Those of you with newborns, try to take photos everyday. It's amazing the changes that occur with these little bundles of joy on a daily basis.

• Take all of the clothes that were given to you for the child and dress them up in those clothes and have a fashion show. I know, it sounds a little frivolous and goofy to do it this way but it's a great way of documenting the clothes and then being able to send a photo to each "giver"to show what the child looks like in them. If you're lucky, the child will get to wear the clothes maybe 3 times before they outgrow them!


• Another photo idea regarding toddlers is to take close up photos where you focus on their eyes (show those baby blues) or teeth (when they start teething) or that lock of hair with a bow in it.


• Once the child is able to stand up, start measuring them on a door frame that has been pre-marked in foot and inches and take photos of each occasion.

Kids grow up fast so take tons of photos when they're younger and more cooperative and you'll be able to enjoy the photos in later years.

The early days ...

My love for photography comes pretty naturally. My grandfather, Earl, always took Polaroid photos (for you youngsters look up Polaroid on wikipedia) of family events. My father, Roy, built a darkroom for us in our garage storeroom. I loved to see the Polaroid photos develop into real photographs in about 90 seconds and see photos emerge from murky chemicals in a deep sink. In our family, seeing someone with a camera in their hands was always expected. We could pose with the best of them faster than Madonna could say "Vogue".

One of my pet peeves with earlier photography was the atomic strength of the light bulbs that were inserted into the instamatic cameras. One flash of the light bulb and a person was blinded for about 5 minutes! "Mom, Dad! Where are you? I can't see ... " "Son, we're over here, walk toward the sound of our voices".

The first Christmas gift my girlfriend, now my wife, bought me was a Pentax K1000 SLR film camera. Being the joker that she can sometimes be, she first handed me a wrapped box. While I opened the box she told me that the old Polaroid camera that I was now looking at was onced owned by Elvis!!! That's great! I'm a huge Elvis fan and I was estatic about this gift. Then she laughed for a couple of minutes and told me that the old Polaroid was just that ... an old Polaroid camera. Yuk! Yuk! Yuk! I was happy either way.