Project 52 - 7 and 5 - Week 20

20/52

I'm always looking for ways to challenge myself behind the camera. Sometimes that means I'll try a new technique or edit differently, but this week was a little different. After reading about how Kelly Marleau from FiddleLeaf Photography took pictures during the witching hour every day for a month, I thought I might try something like this as well. Since I work late on Tuesdays, I decided that 5:00 pm might not work best for me. Instead, I settled on 7:00 am and only for a week... and then on that first day I found myself taking pictures at 7:00 am and 5:00 pm. Apparently, I had to make my own rules.

So, why was this a challenge? Perhaps because 7 and 5 are some of the busiest times in our house. I'll admit that there were days that I quickly snapped a couple pictures and moved on with the tasks for that day, but in some ways, this made me slow down. Notice a moment and be in a moment... set everything else aside for a bit.

I also came to realize that 7:00 am and 5:00 pm are also the two times of the day that Riley is most likely to have Kindle/TV time. I could have shot a whole week of her sitting in front of the Kindle so I had to remind myself that I'm not the worst mom out there, but that this is just reflective of our lives at two brief moments of the day. Luckily, some days capture other moments, such as reading with her dad, feeding the cat a treat, practicing for a school performance, homework time, and even a moment when no one was home, but me.

Most importantly for me, I wanted these pictures to tell the story of our lives. It's why I capture pictures. I want to look back and have these pictures remind me of something, even if it's that my kid watches cartoons during her breakfast every day. They might be pretty, they might not, but they are real.