With the New Year comes new resolutions and new starts. One of mine is to try to take – and print – more pictures of my own kids. I’ve found that I’ve really lapsed in doing each of these in recent years. In a typical case of the “cobbler’s kids have no shoes”, my own albums and gallery walls are looking very outdated. (And let’s not even talk about the fact that my poor youngest has very few pictures of her in comparson to the thousands of shots – all printed and organized in dated albums – that I have of her brother, my oldest, or even her sister, my second.) And as much as I tell my clients that they should – no, NEED – to purchase prints and canvases and not simply be satisfied with digital images stored on a disk or thumb drive (which always end up getting tossed into a drawer and forgotten), I am the worse offender when it comes to my own family. Oh sure, I have hundreds of pictures of my three on my IPhone and on my instagram feed (you can follow me here: http://instagram.com/tamarabarclayphotography/) but I have fewer taken with my “big”camera, and fewer still in albums. And that’s a shame, for I have taken gorgeous pictures of my kids over the years, and I love how much they love to curl up and look at our albums on rainy days, and how excited they used to get when I would update our family gallery wall. So I decided to change things this year.
I’ve been interested in trying a “365” project for the last couple of years and over the holidays I wondered if this would be the way to motivate me to pick up my big camera more often. There are lots of great 365 projects and many are organized around certain themes for each day. And so I chose an interesting one and I tried to commit to it early this month. I lasted for exactly 3 days. Between three little kids, two full time working parents, and endless extra curricular and sporting events, taking, editing, printing and organizing 365 pictures just isn’t realistic. Not for this mom anyway. Not anymore.
But then I had the idea that maybe I could do one photograph a week. A “52” project. Surely I could fit that into the chaos of our lives. And as I thought more about it, it seemed perfect. And as I thought about it even more, I decided to dedicate a day a week to do this. I chose Saturdays. Saturday mornings to be exact. Because while those are still busy days in our home, they also lend themselves to lots of portrait opportunities.
So here is my commitment, made public so it is harder to ignore or let lapse: this year I WILL commit to taking at least one picture each week of at least one of my kiddos. And I WILL edit them asap and prepare and save draft album pages. And at the end of the year, I WILL have a coffee table album made of these pictures. So there: my resolution publicly declared. Check back here or follow me on Instagram to see how I do. Hashtag #52saturdaymornings. What are YOU doing this year?
1/52 – This was the first Saturday of the year, Jan 3, 2015. It was also the day my littlest had her first ever haircut. She is 4 years old. “Four and a quarter” she will tell you. We hadn’t delayed in getting her hair cut because she is a girl and we wanted it to be long; on the contrary, it just never really grew for the longest time. And then suddenly it did. And combined with the fact that she has naturally curly hair, it was suddenly looking like a rat’s nest most days (ok, every day). So the lovely Jasmina cleaned it up for us. And reminded me to keep a lock of my sweet girl’s little curls 🙂
2/52 – My son, my oldest, plays hockey for a local league. He is the full time goalie for his house league team, and splits his time on the “select” team between goal and center. He loves playing goalie, and he has an ideal mind for it; he is able to calm himself and stay centered under pressure. I, on the other hand, bite my nails anxiously for him every single game. This isn’t the best picture. It was taken through the dirty and scratched up glass and the colour is “off”. It’s also super grainy as a result of the high ISO and high shutter speed I needed to use inside the arena. But it’s a perfect capture of a Saturday morning for our family. Because as I often think, “it wouldn’t be a Fall, Winter or early spring weekend if I didn’t spend some part of it in a hockey arena”.
3/52 – Ah, my sweet girls caught unaware on Saturday, January 17, 2015. They were watching a YouTube video of a part of the Sound of Music, when Julie Andrew’s character is trying to teach the VonTrapp children how to sing. My eldest daughter was trying to teach her little sister how to sing “Do, a deer”, and wanted to check how part of the song went. I love that they both love to sing, that the older does so constantly, and that the two girls are so close. My littlest one absolutely adores both her older sister and her older brother. But watching the bond develop between sisters is especially sweet for me.
