Put yourself in the picture
Do you have lots of good family photos? Photos that include you? I never used to, but I do now.
The first year I implemented the family photo rule. Slovenia 2013.
If you are reading this blog, you are likely the picture taker in your family. I am in mine – I take 95% of our photos at events and on vacation. I do it because I enjoy it, although I of course take too many. I noticed a many years back upon returning from vacation that I was in very few of them. As in, there were hundreds of photos of my kids, a few less of my husband, and 3 of me. Three! I am not a big selfie taker and generally don’t put myself in photos, but on a family vacation I was really bummed to have so few, and to have no pictures of all four of us. Honestly I didn’t even notice until culling the photos to make a photo album and I couldn’t find a good family photo to put on the cover. It was a family vacation and I had no family photos. Even the kids noticed and specifically remarked that there were so few pictures of Mommy.
After that vacation I came up with a plan. From that point forward, on every vacation, it is a family rule that we need to take a family photo of all four of us every day. No exceptions. I was expecting pushback from my then pre-teen and teen boys, but it actually turned into a game that we all enjoy. The kids now remind us if the day is getting late and we haven’t done it yet. And when we get home and look at our family photos, there is always at least one of the four of us that is actually good.
So how does this play out in practice? Sometimes we are on the ball and when in a beautiful spot, we ask someone to take a photo. Pre-Covid times this is where most of our family photos come from. Often I will offer to take a photo for someone and they will take ours in return. No one ever minds - I specifically avoid asking grumpy looking people. Sometimes we get to the end of the day having completely forgotten, and snap a family selfie on the way to dinner. Once I woke the family up at 11:59pm to take the selfie. No one liked that one, but I thought it was pretty funny.
We did not see anyone for many hours while on this hike, but at just the right time a couple with a baby in a backpack came up the trail and asked me to take their picture. Iceland 2017.
We now have some wonderful family photos. I almost always use one on the cover of the photo book, and inevitably these are the photos I go back to later on. If you don’t like having pictures taken of you, think about the rest of your family. Even if you don’t want pictures of yourself, they probably will, so take them for the family even if you don’t take them for yourself. Your family will thank you later.
When I organize photos for my clients, I always suggest using facial recognition to add people tags to family members or other important people; sometimes clients ask me to add a “family” type of keyword to make it even faster to find their family photos. They really enjoy being able to pull up an album that has all of these core family photos in it – particularly to see how the kids have grown or to look back at fun family events and vacations.
This one is one of my all-time favorites. Azores 2018.
Every trip seems to start with an airport selfie. Scandinavia 2019. I seem to be shrinking…
If you would like help organizing and adding this functionality to your photo collection, please reach out to me.