The Hypocritical Christmas Card Family Photo - or maybe not…

I take pictures for one overarching reason: I love memories. I love capturing people’s special moments but I love capturing their regular moments even more. This is why I’m so happy about the phone-camera phenomena - now I can photograph a mundane trip to the grocery store without looking like a stalker. I mean, I hear you on the excess. As The Great Jim Gaffigan says, “I have more pictures of my kids then my father ever looked at me!” 

But you know? I don’t care. Someday it won’t seems excessive to have thousands of captured moments from my past life - it will be all I can remember. My memory is not so great without pictures (blame it on mommy-brain or overuse of the iPhone, or genes: thanks mom!). For me, taking a picture is the easiest way to remember something. If it also looks beautiful or tells a story then, bully for that! I see my photography habit as sort of a photo-journalism project with my family and friends as the object. I’m capturing moments that hopefully paint a picture or tell the story of our lives. Narrative is always important. It’s all part of forming an identity, both for ourselves and for our kids. We are living a story and telling it as you go is important for all of us.

The kids look back at pictures and then they “remember” moments from the pictures. Sometimes the pictures tell a very different story then their internal experience of the event. Take, for example, the ubiquitous Christmas Card Family Photo. Everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE knows that getting those photos is the surest and shortest path to feeling like a hypocrite. We all know the stress of finding decent clothing, the never-ending brushing of long, tangled masses of young girl’s hair, aiming for decent light, the surly preteen, the threats to the tiny nose-pickers, and the holiday chaos and yelling that is behind everyone’s Christmas Card Photo. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then I don’t want to be your friend. I am tempted to have a stiff drink this year before trying to get a family photo because I get weirdly stressed about it. Like the Queen is coming to dinner.

Allow me to point out a few things: My oldest child is wearing the shorts he wore to soccer AND his soccer shin guards and cleats because he flat out refused to change more then his shirt. His arm is broken too but that's not because of surlyness. My youngest isn't picking her nose but she is sticking out her tongue. Thomas and Rosie were insane and made silly faces in 25/30 pictures I took to get this done. My sweater is all bunched up and crazy because the remote shutter I was using didn't have the range we needed (#largefamilyproblems) and so I had to run forward four steps and then back four steps everytime I took a picture. I was sweating and looked like I was running in most of the pictures.

It is tempting to look at your picture and think, “What a bunch of phonies.” So, we see our Christmas card photos, our vacation photos, our birthday photos as a “Highlights Reel” and begin to believe that the photos are not reflecting reality. Phony, phony, phony. And maybe they are partly phony. Maybe we should also start to take pictures of the nose-picking, the dirty dishes and the yelling but I think that there’s a better lesson here. I think that we often miss the REALITY of the beauty of our family’s life because we are so stuck in the subjective experience of living with said family. And it’s rarely as happy-feeling as it looks in pictures. However, in another way, those same idealized pictures are reflecting a reality that is MORE real then our negative feelings in a given moment about our family.

I don’t know about you, but my feelings are often a bunch of liars. I hope to someday have feelings that I don’t have to work so hard to align with reality (an ability or trait we can call maturity or holiness) but until that day comes I have to face the fact that my feelings only reflect a small part of reality. For example, my feeling of frustration with my children because they continue to wrestle loudly while I’m cooking dinner does not reflect that if anything happened to them it would shatter my world. That I would saw off my right arm to save them. That I have ordered my entire life around being their mom and that I live and die for them daily in small ways. My frustration with their loudness, while real in itself, is just a small, small slice of the reality of my love for them and yet…it often overwhelms my sense of the bigger picture.

So, the “phony” family picture is actually of great service to me. As my internal feelings during an event fade and take their proper place in the larger fabric of my life I have these pictures that reflect the reality of that moment: an imperfect family, feeling a lot of feelings (some right and real, some false and phony) together. Together in love. That is the realest reality. Thank you, Christmas Card Family Photo. 

Practical Point for Pics

I get a smattering of friends asking me for advice about cameras, lenses, editing and while I have very limited information and skills I have managed to cobble together a “system” in the last couple years that is working for me - both to capture moments, organize them and then print/share them. I figured I’d plop my system down here. The more you are like me then the more helpful this will be. By, “like me”, I mean: A busy person. Some downtime in the evenings a couple nights a week to watch Netflix or something. Not destitute but also not having loads of money to pour into a hobby. Some interest in gaining a skill and willing to set aside a few weeks of evening time to learn. Keep in mind…youtube is your BFF in the world of photography.

7 Steps to Drastically Improve Your Photography:

1. Buy camera body and lens (my equipment is listed below but things change fast. Just know that whatever camera you get you will probably love it. Real cameras are so great these days).
2. Watch youtube video on how to choose your particular camera’s focus point yourself and start doing that manually. This is dramatically increase your accuracy and your composition.
3. Watch youtube videos on the exposure triangle and get your head around what it takes to get out of the automatic setting.
4. Shoot in aperture priority for a while - focusing on controlling just your depth of field and letting you camera decide the ISO and shutterspeed. Stop here if you like. Your pictures will be wildly improved and you will probably be satisfied.
5. If you want to shoot in manual it takes a lot of practice, a lot of mistakes but be guided by the light meter in your viewfinder. Google for more details.
6. Start shooting in RAW if you are able to do any editing. If you aren’t able to do any editing then still shoot in RAW. You never know when you are going to want to edit something. Storage space is cheap these days. Don’t be afraid of the file size. External hard drives are the answer.
7. Simultaneously to steps 1-6, buy Lightroom Classic CC (or try the new one…I know the classic and am still using it). Buy a course (I got one from Udemy) on how to use Lightroom. Spend some evenings learning how to use it. Your pictures and organization will never be the same (see below for details). I wouldn’t rely on youtube at the beginning for help with Lightroom - those worthy folks give slivers of information and what you need at first is a comprehensive overview - especially if you are “low-tech”, like I am. Youtube is good for specific troubleshooting once you understand the software foundations.

Equipment:

I’m assuming that, though the phone cameras continue to improve and make capturing daily life so much easier, you have decided you want a big kid camera too. I got a refurbished D7000 for about $400 on Amazon. Works great. The 7000 series is Nikon’s "in-between series". It’s not entry-level but it’s not professional either. It was an investment but one that I’ve found very much worth the step up from entry-level. The biggest seller is the higher ISO which makes lower light pictures possible (Christmas morning, birthday candles, dark churches, etc.) without the dreaded flash. But there are other nice features that you can check out if you’re interested (or ask me).

The lens I use the most is a 35mm 1.8 (refurbished on Amazon around $200). This is the equivalent of the “Nifty Fifty” on a crop-sensor camera (google Nifty Fifty for why you NEEEEEED this lens or it’s equivalent). The rooms in my house are small and I found that using the 50mm I could never get enough of the room or my people in the frame. There is no zoom on this lens but that’s what cropping after the fact is for.

Editing and Organizing:

Organizing

This is key. Because of the “excess” of pictures that we are now taking. Organization is critical or we will drown. 13 years ago when I had my oldest I used to take a few hundred pictures a year. Now, with iPhones and digital cameras and a tribe of darling children to photograph, a light month is easily in the several hundreds of pictures range. And just forget about December or July (vacation months). I currently have about 52,164 pictures on my (external) hardrive. Organized by year and month from 1981-present. Do I sound proud of that? Because you BET I AM! Darn-tooting proud. 

For both organizing and editing I am using Lightroom Classic CC (an Adobe product). It costs $10/month (all hobbies have some cost but it still hurts a little. Truth is though, it is a STEAL of a deal when it comes down to it) but you also get photoshop with it and other things. If I ever stop paying for it monthly I only lose the ability to use the program for editing. Alllllllll the organizational tools will still be available to me and will never get erased (keywords, face recognition, categories, location mapping, metadata, etc.). So I don’t feel anxious about starting a system that will become obsolete soon. 

Editing

Editing with lightroom as been nothing short of photog-life changing.

*****I have my hands full.***** Everyone tells me all the time and you know, they are right. I do not really have time to “get it right the first time.” Good for all the photographers who have time to put the correct filter on for sunsets. “Rah-rah” for those who can get the shutter speed just right for that soccer game. “Booyah, baby!” to those who can switch lenses for that wide-angle shot in the cathedral. 

I will be next to you just sliding in here for two seconds between potty breaks, wiping sticky-finger-prints from my lens with a baby wipe and snapping an under-exposed shot of my kid mooning the whole world because she didn’t put underwear on this morning. 

I am not going to get it right the first time. I am shooting in manual mode (because it really is way better then auto), and still getting it wrong more often then not. With a decent set of editing software though I can save the picture. And most importantly, I fix it when the kids are down for the night. I have a glass of wine and some reruns of Parks and Rec on Netflix and I edit. I still caught the moment. It still looks better then it would if I’m been shooting on auto. As I mentioned above, shooting in RAW makes this editing process really really remarkable. Especially when moving in and out of sun and shade or inside and outside, you are bound to make a lot of exposure mistakes. Shooting in RAW allows me to recover so much of what I lose in those mistakes.

Printing

The name of the photography game for me is helping my family relive moments and see our happy reality in spite of our daily strife. To develop the narrative. So, to do that I need to actually be displaying our pictures somehow. I have two quick and easy solutions for busy moms who realize they have not printed any pictures in the last 5 years. Or maybe just for those couple of years with 4 under 5 that we refer to as, “The Lost Years.”

1. Digital Frame. Just plop a bunch of pics on an SD card and put it into a digital frame. You can update it frequently or not but the kids will LOVE it and they will get to see those pictures you’ve been taking and they’ll even be tricked into thinking that they are having some screen time. Better then more Curious George. 

2. For printing, Chatbooks is the name of the game for ease…not for quality. Try another service for real heirloom quality books. But for quick, cheap, reliable books there’s nothing like Chatbooks. I get my pictures from my real camera to my phone through Lightroom Mobile (comes with your Lightroom subscription) and then I “favorite” them on my phone and they show up in my mailbox, in a book, with no other work by me. The kids pour over them and carry them to church or the store and sometimes they get ripped and stained but it doesn’t matter because they are cheap and easy and my kids are getting that opportunity to remember and laugh and know that they are part of a family that loves them and values them.

Accessories: 

Bag

I love my LowPro camera backpack for traveling and long outings. My back never hurts, even when I’ve been carrying around my camera all day. For less intense days out I just throw my camera into my purse.

Belt

Ever lean over to kiss a boo boo and then your camera swings in and gives the kid a black eye? This belt is the solution for hikes or ventures where you want your camera out and at the ready but don’t want it flapping all the heck over the place. It’s also super cheap, especially when compared to specialty straps.

Remote

Get one that has as long a range as you can afford. Otherwise you might find yourself running back and forth for the family portrait. Especially if you have a rather larger then average family.

Flashair SD Card

If your camera doesn’t have built in wifi then this card gives you it. You can send your pictures to your phone or computer from anywhere. I find this particularly helpful when I’m on a long drive from vacation. I can work on editing some pictures and post them to my family before I’m even home.