Lifestyle Photography – What it Means to Me

Well I missed (another) 10 Random Things Tuesday post! I really just don’t know where the time is going! Finishing up wedding edits, getting home from Vacation, getting caught up, working on some changes for 2011, getting ready for Christmas and then all of a sudden its Thursday and I haven’t updated the blog in almost a week…tsk tsk!!!

So you know by now that I love capturing photographs for families.  I can say getting a group of children all looking at the camera at the same time smiling perfectly with the parents looking at me instead of the children takes a small miracle (and about a thousand attempts) and I love when we get it (and we most often do) but these are never my favorite shots from a shoot. The whole idea of lifestyle photography inspires me, of REAL lifestyle photography, of capturing your family doing what they do, interacting, being themselves etc, is what I really love!

You may wonder why the post? Well a few months ago when my grandmother passed away I was given the task of going through the family photographs, to separate them for her children and select images for her memorial etc. It was a tough task, but it gave me yet another reason to love what I do. There were quite a few shots of the family posed by the Christmas tree, or for a special event, but the images that I stopped to look at the longest, to laugh at and to share with others who were around the house were the images I would class as “lifestyle” shots. They were pictures that captured the essence of my grandmother, of her family, of their chemistry. These images showed her love for her children, what life was like during the time they were taken, what they usually wore, how they liked to play etc. It really opens up a window to what their life was like, and it was a window that I love to be able to look through. I am fortunate that my grandfather was (and I would say still is) an amazing photographer, and could capture his family this way….but one big downfall of being your own family’s lifestyle photographer….he isn’t in any of these photographs. I know he was behind the camera, but something is missing in the shots. I’m a thinker so all of this has made me realize that I’m going to want someone ELSE coming to take photos of my family like this, so that I can have them and so that I can be in them too. (It may sound selfish…and maybe it is, but I think that my kids (and their kids) will someday enjoy seeing them as much as I enjoy looking at these images of my grandmother and my dad’s family) It also made me hope that other people will take the time to have someone capture their family spending time together.

I hope you enjoy these photos, miss you gwanny. xo (Ps wasn’t she beautiful???!!!)

Photos taken by Maurice Crosby