When I started Tenor Dad around two years ago, I needed to choose a picture for my avatar, and I didn’t know what to choose. A picture of myself? A picture of my kids? A picture of me singing on stage? What felt right? What could possibly capture everything that I wanted these pages to be about? In the end, I settled on what was one of my favorite recent-at-the-time pictures of my family. I decided that this was Tenor Dad, not Dad Tenor. This was going to be about a dad who sang, not a singer who dadded. In the photo I chose, the whole family was standing in a line in front of our house, hands held, with perfect dusky lighting, and I thought it said what I wanted to say.
After a year or so, I decided that the picture was a little outdated, since everyone was a year older, and people coming here to read about my toddler would see a picture of a baby on all of the links. As luck would have it, my wife’s whole extended family was getting together to have a friend take pictures, and they were going to do it at our new house in Vermont. I suggested that we try to recreate the pose from the original picture, which we did, and I have been using it ever since.
Now another year has gone by, and I have been planning to redo the picture for months, but have never gotten around to it. Suddenly, time has run out. This is the last week of summer vacation. Ruby starts kindergarten next week, a few leaves have already turned brown, and if I want a lush and green background for my photo, it has to be done asap. This is why, when my sister-in-law was over last night, I asked her to come over super early this morning before my wife went to work to take new pictures of us.
The problem with this idea is was that, what with it being early in the morning, everyone was tired. The kids did not want to get dressed, nobody could find their shoes, and this photo shoot quickly starting becoming one of those things that sounds great late at night, but when you wake up in the harsh light of morning seems completely insane. Undeterred, we pressed on, forcing the children into their clothes and outside into the courtyard for the big shoot.
The trick to taking these pictures was clearly trying to make sure that both children were looking at the camera at the same time. This happened slightly less than 1% of the time. Luckily my sister-in-law took over 200 pictures, so we got two great shots! I was quite satisfied with this result, but our photographer, being a consummate professional, decided that we ought to do more shots in different poses in different places. She is actually a good photographer, and her ideas were quite good, but by this time the children had lost interest and my wife had to go to work, so we didn’t get to do everything that my sister-in-law wanted. I fear that she was not fulfilled creatively by this particular shoot, but in the end I got what I wanted, so she did a great job by the client’s standards. 100% satisfaction!
And so I now have a new photo to use for this space, and a new found knowledge that early morning photo shoots only seem like a good idea late at night. Next year I’m thinking mid-afternoon.
Great idea and great pics, Adam!