One question I get more frequently than you’d expect: some variation on the following.
How do you take a family photo in which everybody pictured looks relatively non-miserable, is facing at least marginally in the direction of the camera, has their eyes at least half-open, and appears to some degree to be related to each other rather than random strangers passing by each other on the street?
It’s possible. Not easy, true…but possible. Step One involves letting that random guy who you stopped to ask to take your photo use your damn iPhone, because everybody knows how to use an iPhone and nobody knows how to use your DSLR. And iPhone photos may not what you’re looking for, but they will also not be of the inside of a lens cap and/or your blurry feet. (You can read the rest of my post about how to achieve The Great And Elusive Family Photo over on The Scenic Route, if you’re so inclined.)
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But one more thing.
If you scroll to the bottom of this post – but don’t do that yet, please – you’ll find a photo taken well over a year ago that I’ve never posted, but have been meaning to because I think it’s an interesting one.
The day on which it was taken wasn’t great: I had hired a photographer to come meet us in my parents’ courtyard because I thought it might be nice to get a professional family photo while our daughter was still little and sleepy, and because my mom wanted one of her with all of us. But about five minutes after we started doing that “look at how happy and engaged with each other!” dance that you do when a professional is taking a family photo, my son decided to throw a massive (and I do mean massive) temper tantrum; the kind of temper tantrum that makes passers-by roll their eyes at your terrible parenting.
We ended up spending most of our time calming down our son in extremely non-Christmas-card-friendly ways. I distinctly remember cycling through being mad at him and being mad at myself for being mad at him, and then being mad again because he was being so rude to the photographer, and then getting mad at myself again because getting mad at a three-year-old is both a huge exercise in futility and kind of silly. I know what my own parents would have done in this situation: they would have told me to smarten up and do what they said. And I would have done it, because they were scary when they got serious.
But I couldn’t say what my parents would have said. In most circumstances I’m comfortable being a fairly tough parent, but not in this one. Given what I do for a living, it’s very, very important to me that my kids never feel like they “have” to be in a photo, and certainly never feel like they “have” to participate in anything even tangentially related to my work (which this wasn’t, but I’m not sure how they would have understood the difference). Except even when you’re a parent, and even when you know better, you’re still a human. And if you’re me, that means you get annoyed about having wasted money, and embarrassed about having made a pretty big scene in front of a relative stranger who was clearly not super pleased with the situation. You get mad at a three-year-old, and then, as a bonus, you get mad at yourself. It’s as awesome as it sounds.
After about twenty minutes of trying to calm down our son while our photographer wandered uncomfortably around the entrance to the building, clearly wishing that she could escape, we were in bad moods ourselves, and decided to give up. We told the photographer that we were really sorry, and that she should go ahead and put away her camera; this obviously wasn’t going to work. While she packed up her bags we sat down on a low wall, each of us holding a child, just completely over the whole thing. We laughed a little at how ridiculous parenting can feel sometimes, and then we kissed.
And there it is: a photo of us, exactly as we were at that exact moment in time. A little tired, a little frustrated, but together anyway.
Summary: Family photos don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be you.
