Children

This is a lovely little girl whose picture sits right above my computer monitor.  When she was a baby, I could hear her crying at my neighbor's house with such volume and intensity, but there was nothing wrong.  I suppose one of those things that we attribute to a baby being colicky.  My own daughter screamed like that quite regularly, especially when I was dying to get some sleep.  Of course both grew out of it, and since, I never saw this little one unhappy.

At times she'd come walking to the fence that separated our yards, twisting at the waist, just waiting for my Mastiff puppy to come to the fence so she could scream in excitement and run away.  Everything was something to laugh or scream wildly at.  Grandma's house was a place of such excitement that she had to be completely exhausted before she would sleep, all so she could start again the next day.

Her brother, on the other hand, was quite shy.  He would often hide his face from me, but if he saw my dogs first, he'd start calling to them, completely ignoring that I was outside and could see him having fun.

Photographing children, in my experience, is so much more rewarding than the challenge of adults.  They are much less inhibited and even when they pose for a photograph, their entire personality is on display.  An adult, or even older child, stands or sits, trying to look their best and be perfectly still because that is the goal that has been drilled over and over and over.  While I appreciate a good, staged photograph for preservation, I always want to capture who they are, not just what they look like.