Tacoma Washington Family StoryTelling Photography | When I initially paid the tuition for the Telling Stories With Lifestyle Photography Workshop, by Colie James Photography, I simply wanted inspiration and motivation to take pictures of my own family. As a photographer, I spend a good amount of time behind the camera. However, the lens is mostly pointed at other families rather than my own.
After spending an entire afternoon finalizing a newborn session for a client, I realized that I never spent that kind of time on pictures of my own family. And, that made me sad! I decided that I wanted to provide my family what I was providing other families…but, I knew that unless our hair was done perfectly and we were wearing the perfect outfits, I would never use my “Big” camera to document my own family. And prior to taking the workshop with Colie James, I couldn’t see my day to day life as something that I would want to take photographs of at all. In the middle of smushed goldfish and sticky grape jelly hands, I was hardly finding inspiration, let alone an ounce of motivation.
Once the workshop started, I noticed an immediate transformation in what I saw. Instead of seeing just a regular old boring day, I saw life. And I saw us living a life. I noticed the details that I would have dismissed as a mess or something that was out of place. I noticed the intimacy of our family in our daily routines. I noticed how delicate my husband bathed and dressed my youngest daughter. And, my heart was exploding, every time I uploaded another card memory card, full of our day to day life.
PINIMAGETacoma Family StoryTelling Photography | Tacoma Birth Photographer.com
Throughout the workshop Colie provided excellent feedback and made me push myself and my ideals of photography. She gave me that motivation that I was in seek of, but she also helped transform and regain my passion for photography. I am not lying when I say that I fell in love with photography again…and I did!
Now I want to tell MY story, OUR story. I want to tell the story of my family. The boring day to day that we live, yet we cherish years, if not only a few short days afterwards. I want to remember what it was like when it was just myself, my youngest daughter and my 3 year old, are home alone, while my older two daughters were at school and my husband was at work. I want to remember our days of dancing in our pajamas to Yo Gabba Gabba without a worry in the world! I want to remember our naps as we snuggle in together, still in our pajamas from the previous night, with jelly stained cheeks and hearts as full as they could be. I want to remember that. Not only as a memory, but I want those moments to be documented for not only me, but for my babies. There will come a day when I won’t be able to tell them what our days were like… and I want them to have something to look back on and not only see it, but feel it.
I have since documented so many “boring days”, and those are my most cherished images. While I believe there is a time and place for posed, studio or not, portrait photography, my heart and vision and my passion, has completely shifted to REAL LIFE. As an artist and as a photographer, I want to document life, instead of pose it.
PINIMAGETacoma Family StoryTelling Photography | KaetheJo Binder Photography
xoxoxo
