My friend Jo McAvany, like many parents, is constantly photographing her children. And like other photographers that are working portraitists in this competitive camera culture she uses them as models as she tries out poses for her clients.
Last week Jo took her two kids to the Chase museum and gave her seven-year-old son Emit a little point-and-shoot Sony camera so he could take pictures. He later showed me his photos; they were the typical short person views of the things that he saw at the museum.
There were outside photos of the building, a display of baskets, historic bones, old plates, photos of photographs of people from the town’s history and even some shots of an electric Singer sewing machine (like my mother used when I was very young).
I think that was a good idea to give him a camera so he would zero in on specific things and maybe he will have good memories of that visit. I photographed a museum when I was about his age and still have some prints in a tattered old photo album, back then the end product was an envelope of 4x6 inch prints.
As I looked through his images I saw there were also shots going down the road to their house, dogs at the gate, an ostrich and noisy ducks, and photos of his mother photographing her daughter, Evinn, sitting on a small white chair in the middle of a deep-grassed field.
The next few photos reminded me that Jo’s kids are used to posing. Evinn was sitting on her dad’s tractor. However, unlike the snapshot type shots one usually sees, the photos Emit made were posed. I would like to have been there to watch as Emit and Evinn copied what they had learned from their photographer mother. They chose a good angle without shade blocking Evinn’s face and I’m sure there was some collaboration regarding Evinn’s pose.
Evinn and Emit both know how to pose and one shot was, in my opinion, perfect and good as any on our local Facebook photographer’s page.
I’ll print that photo and a few others and give them to Emit. I wonder what he will do with them?
I am hoping Emit will take up photography as a hobby. Not those quickly made documents of people that are so popular now a days, but meaningful, creatively thought out photographs.
I’ll try to help with that by printing some of his pictures and suggest he send them in the mail to his grandparents. That way he can feel special about his photography. Just leaving the files on his camera won’t make them mean anything. Scrolling through a hundred mixed up images on a tiny screen gets old, and saving them on his mom’s or my computer means he will have no, or at least limited access.
But “Prints” of those camera files…actual photographs that he can hold in his hand and even put in an envelope to send or show to special people might make him think more of his photography.
I wonder where my old 4x6 printer is?
Stay safe and be creative. These are my thoughts for this week.
Contact me at www.enmanscamera.com or emcam@telus.net.
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