A Lesson In Manners - Observations From A Five Year Old Photographer

gemma and i walk to and from school every day and she made a great observation which she thought she would share through photos...  no one asks nicely to no get junk mail.  

no please.

no thank you.

and some are down right grumpy about it.  this one warns that the sender will incur the cost of returning all the advertising and promotional materials.

as we walked along, gemma wondered out loud if the post man ever just gave them junk mail anyway because they did not have any manners.  she reckoned that she would to teach them a lesson.

Dusting Off Her Interest and Her Point and Shoot Camera

Gemma came to me and said that she wanted to take pictures again, so we are keeping the battery charged and she is responsible for her own camera.  We have passed on the old family point and shoot with a beautiful kid length (handmade for her by a wonderful friend) camera strap and a small case.  As her mom, I get asked a lot for camera recommendations for kids.  My answer for now is "nothing fancy" when they are this young.  Gemma enjoys capturing what she sees and while I am teaching her about exposure and photography theory, she is really only interested in pointing and shooting.  She is five.  We did move into the "scene" modes, so she is picking the correct settings for the situation.  She is learning in the process, what the camera is doing and why those choices are appropriate for action or portraits or macro etc...

I think the first lesson for kids who want to take pictures is how to care for a camera and then how to hold it while shooting.  We work on making sure the lens is clean, finger placement, support and protection of the camera.  The kid sized camera strap keeps the camera at a good position on her little body...if the strap is too long, the camera will swing around and knock into things.

Life around here lately in pictures according to Gemma.

You need to feed unicorns glitter.

Bears like the sun.

Dad likes bikes. (that is mom's new bike, dad's bikes are fancier)

The twins do not like their bike ride.

Our family portrait before the bike ride. (she had to use a substitute helmet for alec's since he had his and she would not do the photo without "all of us there")

The leaves are all brown now...it happened in just a few days.

And finally, what she named her best shot.  She was so proud of this one as she took it through the small hole in the fence where the gate handle is.  We have olive trees (lots of olive trees) surrounding the area where we will be starting our "urban farm" / square foot garden. 

What I found most interesting about looking at her shots now as opposed to the ones that were on the card from ages ago...there are not as many people shots.  In fact, this time around, there were none.  There are some people shots since this batch, but there is a real effort on her part to putting together scenes and capturing the "things" around her.