Budding Photographer

A couple weeks before school started Jake and I headed out for a photo shoot. Maddie was sick, Mike was sick and watching t.v. and I was bored. Armed with our cameras, Jake and I headed out.

The rules were simple: we would drive around taking turns picking "left/right/straight" when we came to intersections. If either of us saw something we thought would be interesting for taking pictures we got to say "stop" and I pulled the car over for an impromptu photo session.

Jake wasn't too sure what I meant by just pulling over whenever, but he got into the spirit of things fairly quickly. Note: All shots taken by Jake.
The first stop was some silos near our home.

Jake decided that he liked shots taken at an angle. He thought he was pretty clever to have come up with this all by himself.


He really liked the angle shots.

We stopped near some horses. Neither one of us had a very good zoom lens, but I like his shot between the weeds...

And he started walking around taking pictures of things I hadn't even seen. His eye level and mine weren't the same, but soon I was following him around...

It struck me as odd that he went to take a picture of this sign. Only because I had just seen it and thought about taking some pictures as well. Great minds think alike.

One of the things Jake absolutely wanted to find was a flag. It was getting late into our hour, but we managed to come across this one. He was at the ready for the wind to blow this flag out and kept whispering as he held his camera to his face, "C'mon wind. Just a little...come on..." Unfortunately the wind wasn't cooperating.

Next we found a dirt road. It was awesome light and we hopped right out.

We couldn't figure out how to take these pictures without getting our shadow involved.

He was fascinated with the cows and the fact that we could get a lot closer than the previous horses.

We started taking more dirt roads. Honestly, Jake was getting a little nervous that we were getting lost. He said, "Mom...do you know where we are?" I replied, "Nope. Not exactly, I just know the general direction we need to head in." He said, "That's not good, mom." Apparently he knows of my directionally-challenged-inner-navigation-system.

We meandered down more dirt roads and I told him we were running low on time and light. We stopped at this farm to work on getting different pictures with the sun. I tried to explain to him how to take different pictures to show the farm as a silhouette.

I think he's a fast learner.

And again with the copyrighted "Jake tilt".

And then some...

We found some flowers over near the side. Again...his field of view got him right in the middle of the flowers. I had my flowers lining the bottom of my picture. Just a good reminder to me to try different angles.

While we still had some light I taught him the art of self-portraits.

Which he practiced as we drove home...

But neither of us could resist stopping here. Jake was more comfortable at this point because he actually knew where we were. So even if it got dark, he was certain we could get home.

His final pictures involved an old dock we found. He was getting frustrated that his camera was making everything dark. Unfortunately it was getting very dark outside. After changing some settings for him on his camera, he shot this.

It's very blurry and noisy, but I like it a lot. I think it gives it a bit of an ethereal quality. Of course, I'm his mom so I may be biased...but I'm probably right anyway.

And we did indeed make it home safe and sound. It was about 90 minutes of quality time with Jake doing something where we both learned from and taught each other something.

A date night we'll definitely be repeating.