School of Design: Photography Tips and Tricks 4
Welcome to Design House Digital’s School of Design. Today, and every single day in September, we’ll have new blog posts; informative, detailed, and FREE classes that will take your digital scrapbooking to the next level. Each subject will have a new post weekly, and at the end of the month you won’t believe how much you’ve learned!
Welcome back for another installment of Photography Tips and Tricks! I hope you all are enjoying these School of Design blog posts as much as I am. This week I want to talk to you about photo traditions.
One of the best ways to capture great, heartwarming images is to start a photo tradition.
First well start with some examples and ideas to get your thinking…
One of our family photo traditions is our anniversary pictures. Every year on our anniversary I buy a mini cake and number candles to display how many years we’ve been married. It’s quick and simple and easy to show exactly what year we are celebrating.
Another idea I love seeing, is the first day of school pictures. I recommend taking them in the same place each year (like in front of your front door or in front of the school) or have your child pose in a similar way each year. I love this idea of having the child hold a sign of what grade they are starting and who their teacher is that year.
Another idea I love is taking a picture of your child with the same inanimate object. With my niece we took pictures of her with a teddy bear each month. When we started out, she was smaller than they teddy bear, and is slowly getting to be about the same size. I’m excited to one day take a picture of her graduating college hugging that same bear. I’ve also seen this type of tradition down where they child is sitting in a particular chair each year. Here’s another cute example I found on Pinterest of a baby in the same onesie quarterly.
Now that you have some ideas, here are some tips for sticking to it and getting the most out of your tradition.
- Don’t over stress it! The second or third year we were married we got home late on our anniversary and had both been busy most of the day. We ended up waiting and taking the picture the next day. I cried because I thought our tradition was ruined and ended up fussing at my newlywed husband for why he wouldn’t just go shave and shower even though it was 10 o’clock at night. Looking back on it now, that was the silliest thing I could have done. One of these days when we are old and gray and I have all 50 anniversary pictures all lined up beside one another, do you think it will make any difference to me that that one was taken on June 4th and not June 3rd. I think not! So my point is, learn from my mistake and don’t stress it. Don’t set unreal expectations of the tradition and remember the sentiment behind it and not the fake rules you’ve made up for it.
- Keep it simple. Having a cake with a number on it or holding a sign with the school grade are both pretty easy to pull together and do. Don’t make the tradition a big elaborate event that you will have a hard time repeating.
- It’s never too late to start. So what if your child is in the third grade and you don’t have the beginning years. You can start the tradition now and you will still appreciate the ones you do have.
- Don’t give up. Say you decide to do Project 52 and take a picture of you and your child once every week for a year. (I know a lot of you might not want to be in that many pictures, but how many of us don’t wish we had more pictures of us with our parents when we were little???) If you happen to miss one week, take two the next or just skip a week. Pick it back up when you have time and don’t hold it against yourself. Having a book of 50 family pictures at the end of the year will still make an awesome scrapbook.
I really hope I’ve inspired you to start some of your own photo traditions. I promise they will be worth the time and effort. Or maybe you already have some and you’d like to share the idea with the rest of us. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!
