And let me tell you, getting a good picture is a hard thing! For starters we usually take our own pix here at home, having a resident photography buff on hand. Well, as you can imagine, this creates somewhat of a little problem in and of itself. In order to get all four of us in a picture, Travis has to set his camera to auto-shoot and then get over to the rest of us, position himself so he'll actually be in the frame and then try to smile and look relaxed, like he didn't just spend a hasty 20 seconds scrambling to beat the auto snap feature. I can't tell you how many pictures we have with Travis half in the frame, just his arm showing, or his head cut off, having not quite made it into the shot in time. So there's always that. But on top of that there's getting the people in the picture to look relatively normal and perhaps even to smile. Now, this is a challenge for any photographer but poor Trav doesn't really have the best subjects to work with. First off there's the kids. Noah is really too little to get to smile so the best we can do is get him to maybe look in the direction of the camera. This usually involves someone standing behind the camera making faces, snapping their fingers, jumping up and down, doing a monkey impression, or just doing whatever it takes and generally acting silly. Of course, this is a problem when we want the whole family in the picture since there's no one left for such antics. So in most the pictures Noah ends up looking off to the side, usually towards Travis. But really, who could blame him? Wouldn't YOU be gawking if your dad just vaulted the couch, scooped up your sister in a rush and yelled "SMILE!"
Then there's Bree. In years past we've managed to get her to smile at the camera in these types of family shots by going, "Here comes Daddy! He's running over here like crazy! Look at the flashy light, isn't it silly. It's flashing, it's gonna blink at you!" or tickling her and etc, making it into something silly for her. But now, she's just at that perfect age where she is virtually impossible to photograph. First of all she's just too busy to sit still long enough. We have plenty of shots with her as just a blur, leaving the frame. This is not to mention her "sense of entitlement" we'll call it (instead of difficult phase) that she feels rather strongly lately that leads to things like this: "Okay, Bree. Sit next to your brother please." "I don't want to!" "Brianna, smile!" "I don't want to smile!" "Please baby, we're trying to send a picture to Grammy and she wants you to smile." "No more pictures! I don't want to take pictures!"
As if all that weren't bad enough there's also me. I don't mean to be difficult but I have a problem, I just can't seem to look natural in a picture. If you've ever seen that episode of Friends where Chandler is trying to get pictures taken of himself then you know what I mean. In the show, he'll look great have a nice smile on his face and the minute the camera comes up he stiffens up and looks weird. He cannot take a normal looking picture. Same for me. (Which is why you don't see me posting a lot of pix with me in them on here.) When I see pictures of other people I think, yep, that's so and so all right, looks just like them and don't they look nice. And when I see pictures of me I go, "Oh my God! Is that really what I look like?" Now, don't get me wrong. I think I'm okay looking overall, not too bad. After all, you don't get to be (ahem) how old I am without at least starting to get pretty comfortable in your own skin. But in front of the camera I look as awkward as a teenager on their first date. Maybe I'm trying too hard or something but I have two problem areas, my neck and my eyes, and one or the other of them, or both, seemingly of their own control, decides to freak out and look weird in any given picture of me. Suddenly, my neck will develop giraffe syndrome and start to elongate, pushing my head forward and my chin upwards making me look awkward and usually giving a great view of my nostrils. That or the neck will pull my head backwards in order to show off that little fleshy part under my chin, "the double," that no matter how thin I get still manages to hang around. As for my eyes, they also usually cause trouble by one of two routes, either being halfway closed thus making me look sleep deprived and/or stoned, I think perhaps exacerbated by the neck tilt thing. Or they open up super wide and bug out, which usually happens when the camera is about to go off about half a second after I feel the urge to blink and make an effort not to. Maybe I have puffy eyelids but whatever it is, I can't seem to look like I have my eyes all the way open without the "deer in the headlights" effect.
So, having thoroughly explained to you what Travis was up against here's some shots you wouldn't otherwise see:
Prime example number one of my giraffe neck syndrome. And this is a relatively mild case of it, there's WAY worse. I suppose if I were supremely confident and super cool I would share some of those with you, but nope, this is the best you get. So actually, it's not the worst shot ever, Noah's looking at the camera and looks cute but I look kinda stiff, that's my fakey smile as it gets hard to un-fakey smile on demand after awhile.
Oops! The camera fired when we weren't ready yet, there's Trav leaning over, see his sleeve? And, obviously, Noah and I are real thrilled about it. This is what our faces tend to look like between shots since there's usually quite a bit of time between the pictures while Trav adjusts this and that and then readjusts this and that. I'm not really complaining mind you, since I get to enjoy the pictures afterwards. But during the process we can get a bit restless and impatient. Although, I actually like this one of me better than some, at least I look normal. Not happy, but natural at least.
This is perhaps the truest picture of our reality at that moment. Typical. Brianna bawling because she resented Trav scooping her up into his arms, trying to pose (she doesn't like to feel forced into anything and really didn't want to be doing pictures) and Noah looking at the commotion, binky in place since he was getting crabby and was howling without it. And Travis and I, looking pretty good. Actually at that moment we were laughing at just the sheer absurdity and hopelessness of saving the moment. I don't know what's with us lately. There would have been a time when we would have been upset and stressed out in the face of such 3 yr. old angst and fury. But these days we just laugh at the kids when they both start up, perhaps because we've figured out that lots of times there's nothing we can really do to make it better, we're helpless to fix it and they just have to wind down. And sometimes you just have to laugh in the face of such irrational fury.
Getting close, but not quite. Noah's staring at Trav again, giving away that he's just done something interesting. (You gotta admire his ability to run over super fast and look so relaxed, would you have guessed he just scrambled into place?) And Bree's doing, I dunno, whatever weird face she can think of to avoid smiling. But hey, don't Trav and I look cute? We seem to have found a pose where my neck is in such a position it can't suddenly careen out of control.
Ooh, almost, except for those darn kids again! :) Wouldn't you know it, my favorite shot of myself, and Trav always looks good and the kids are spaced off somewhere.
So, I guess technically, this was our best formal family portrait, everyone looking reasonably happy and more importantly, looking at the camera! (But still, not my favorite shot of me, neck again...oh well.)
And here's a cute picture of the kids... shot on a completely different day. We decided to take another whack at it, however still only managing to get Bree to smirk a little. Still, pretty cute eh?Of course, none of these are the shots we chose to use for our "official" Christmas pix we shared with family and friends, don't want to ruin it for them. But now you know how it really went down.
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