Baby Photos

I look back at the photos that my parents took of me when I was young, and I see a few carefully chosen photos. Photos that were a product of 28 exposure film rolls that needed to sent out to be turned into prints. Even with the one-hour prints, there was no instant gratification or feedback, no way to immediately know if the shot is good or bad. Net result is that the photos that were taken were fussed over to make sure they came out, and that shots weren’t wasted.

Nowadays, digital photography is the thing. There really are no limits to how many photos you can take, so, take as many as you can now, and decide which to keep later. Photos are taken for all sorts of reasons. Like, I’ll take pictures to capture the moment. I take pictures for holiday cards. I take pictures even to document an outing: maybe a trip with my son to the grocery store or a visit to his favorite swing. Not always keepers, but they punched up the story. This gets me to the 2700 photos I have of my one-year old son.

Some photos come from my nice Nikon — those pictures are great. Some are from my iPhone — those, not so much because of the low resolution and slow “shutter speed” (try to take a picture of your baby on a swing with an iPhone and you’ll see what I mean). And then there are a photos from the other two cameras we have. The advantage that film cameras had over digital ones was the ability to improve the quality of your pictures by buying better film, instead of having to buy a new camera for more megapixels.

We have lots of pictures of our son. Some of the pictures are taken by me, some by my wife, some by my grandparents. But, across all the photos, I noticed a trend: our son looked, more times than not, either very serious or surprised. He has a beautiful smile, but it was difficult to capture on camera. Every time he saw the camera, he became very serious. That was it! Looking at the camera. He has always studied objects, and that was what the camera was. But, he always smiled at people. So, what if I framed up the shot, but made my face visible for him to see? He’d react to me, and wouldn’t study the camera. Success! Fewer of the surprised or serious baby, and more great smiles. We even won a photo contest!

Now that I know the secret, I have a lot more smiles to catch.