A Day with a Three Year Old

I am three and the world is all about me

A friend of mine has a three year old granddaughter that I enjoy being with. When she was two, it seemed that she was constantly on the run and when I tried photographing her, I mainly got her backside as she was always running in the opposite direction. Now that she is three, she seems to enjoy when I photograph her and even commented last session "I am good at taking pictures" even though she was in front of the camera. She does love to pose but the images that I really love are the unexpected shots I got when she wasn't posing. We were supposed to be outside but as luck would have it, it was raining but we decided to see what we could get.

Look

Some of my favorite shots were taken while she was looking out a window into the woods. As she was sitting there, lost in her own world, she was spinning a story about a wolf and a little girl that she rattled on about as she sat there. I loved her imagination and we talked back and forth about what was happening. I was just happy to be allowed to be part of her world even for a short time. The great thing is she was not tuned into me and my camera.

Wonder

Fixing Her Hair

Young children are not as camera shy as older children or adults, more natural and uninhibited. Anxious to talk and tell you things like where they got a boo-boo. 

See my Boo-boo.

By the end of the day she was getting tired but was still receptive. I thought it best to end the shoot and come back another day when we could be outside. She looked like she was ready for a nap as well as myself and her Grammy.

Raining Outside, I 'm Bored

Boxer

                                                                     
                                          
                                      September 7, 2002-April 28, 2012

Boxer

Our cat, Boxer went into renal failure about 2 months ago and after struggling hard for his last week, we had to make the tough decision of considering euthanasia. The last week that he was with us I took over 150 pictures of him, wanting to preserve him, knowing the inevitable but not wanting to let him go.
It was nearly 10 years ago that I had taken my youngest son to a friends party and I was headed home when I passed a yard where 2 young boys were sitting with a cage with 3 kittens. They had a sign saying "free kittens". I stopped to take a look (we were cat less at that point). One of the boys said his Mom told him that he could not come back in the house until he got rid of all the kittens. To help him out I took one. My husband was out of town at the time so it was the perfect opprortunity.
When I brought him in the house he was immediately accepted by our children and our chocolate lab, Sadie. From the beginning he was a tough guy. He greeted Sadie by standing on his back legs and swatting at her nose with his front paws, hence his name, Boxer.
It has been a week since he has been gone and a lot of memories have been exchanged. We have seen him wrestle a snake while standing on his hind feet, he snagged on of his front fangs when he was just a kitten and had to have it pulled (with no anesthesia) which made his mouth a little lopsided, he was a hunter, yet kind enough to become the "big brother" to an abandoned kitten that my daughter found on the side of the road.
He was also a wonderful model for numerous photos over the past decade. I was reminising this week, looking back at old images. I had backed up all of my digital files and went to the archives to look for his kitten images. I started to get a little concerned when I couldn't find them, knowing that I had backed up everything because of a previous scare of almost loosing some other important images. (Note:very important to back up images). After a few panicked moments, I realized that I was still shooting film at the time that we got him, whew.
Boxer was not an affectionate cat.  He would sit near you but rarely on your lap. He had the longest whiskers, the prettiest green eyes and I was always amazed at how he kept the pads on his paws as pink as the day I brought him home (even though the were exposed daily to Georgia red clay).
He is missed.