My snapshot project

For those of you wondering about the toning in the photos below, I thought I might tell you a bit about my 'snapshot project'.

A personal project of mine at the moment, it is about ensuring that I let go of the 'need' to have every image of Poppy be a 'portrait' and make sure we have plenty of the kind of snapshots that I have from my childhood - the kind that tell me who I was and what I did on a day to day basis. Like the fact that I loved to wear bowls on my head... that I loved nothing more than hanging out in my hula skirt... and that once, even if it was only for a few years around my third or fourth birthday, I actually did look alright in a bikini :0)

As a photographer, I have a tendancy to judge ALL of my images by a professional standard and thus not wanting to 'keep' images that are not perfect. But after spending some time looking through our own baby and childhood photos DJ made me promise that I would provide Poppy with this kind of memory. This is harder said than done for me because it means not immediately throwing out the out of focus images (see the photo of Poppy below with her hands out asking 'where'd it go?') or under exposed images. It is also hard for me because it means I have to be in photos sometimes. Yuck.

But more importantly, what it will mean is that Poppy will always have the memory of her looking like a ghetto princess with her dummy in her mouth and the fact that on the day she first met her shadow she tried to outrun it with her tongue hanging out of her mouth...

So back to the toning. Part of this project is about experimenting with colour to 'match' the tonal qualities of my childhood images - the yellowed, faded kind. This is also part of my effort to ensure that people can see, when our photos are side by side, that Poppy does in fact bear a resemblance to me and is not simply a DJ clone ;0)

I am not sure if the toning will stay but it serves a purpose for now and experimenting is all part of the fun :0)

Fran x