A Bride

Here is the gorgeous bride from the wedding my husband and I attended a couple months ago.  When we married, she was 9, and that was the first time I met her (and most of my husband's family.)  At the time, we were living about 3 hours away from them and it was a guessing game each Thanksgiving trying to figure out which cousin was which.  In my defense, he has a lot of cousins.  They hit their growth spurts sporadically like most and trying to keep them straight by height or how old they looked just didn't work.

She is the youngest, and it has been amazing to see the woman she has become.  I remember moments from her teen years, like wanting to be old enough to try out for American Idol and that I can't even recall seeing her at her graduation open house (those are really for your parents anyway.)

Today, she's a woman who is open and fun, enjoys the bingo hall, and can connect with my son in a way that should probably make me feel incompetent, but rather makes me so happy to see him engage with someone who really gets him.

It's not always easy to find someone who is as beautiful on the inside as they are on the outside, but she definitely makes the list.  

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.

Aw crap, what am I doing?

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I am doing.  Sadly, I can report nothing.  I have no idea what to do with myself.  While trying to put a portfolio online, I just became so disappointed in the process.  Filing through over 15,000 photos is exhausting, especially with a computer who seems to have more of a personality than I do.

I could say for the moment, I've given up on the idea of creating a website for the sole purpose of doling out a url for those who ask to see my portfolio.  I'm of the variety who loves to touch a photograph, and seeing them online just doesn't make me feel quite the same.

There's also the concern of what to choose.  I know what I like, I know what I want, but do I dare let others take a look with the possibility that they will see nothing?  Yes, but boy does the idea suck.

Which all culminates to this point.  Screw the organization of a portfolio for now.  I love photographs.  All I want to do is share them and have them shared with me (which my friends can testify to my constant nagging for photos) because they all tell a story.  Even if the story is, "I screwed this one up."

The picture above isn't even mine, while editing a relative's recent wedding photos, I found this gem that my husband took of his cousin.  I thought it was a fabulous way to express how I feel about starting this blog and making myself stick to it.  No one can see all the photos I surround my desk and fill my hard drive with, so here I am, putting them out there in the hopes that someone will want to share these visual stories with me and show their own.

 The only value anything has, is what we give it.