Taking good photos with the family in tow

Double Negative said:
Friends, relatives and other people who know me - know to just ignore me if I stop and lag behind for a second, or dash off suddenly. I trained them well. :D
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Yep, what he said! Get them trained now or else your family will start to hate your cameras! My girls know that if I stop or dash off to take a photo it will just be a few moments and I will return. :D
 
In ten years the photos of your family will mean so much more than anything you might find on the streets...
A change of attitude is what's needed here...you think your family is preventing you from photography but they are your reasons and subjects for it...enjoy it while you can, soon they'll be all grown up and gone...
 
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* Me and my daughter.

I asked my wife to take this using my camera (film, of course). You can say it's a family activity. Much more fun that way :)
 
In the evenings and weekends, my family are my subjects. On my lunchbreaks (I'm lucky to work in Central London), I go walking and it can be architecture, street, or just whatever interesting is going on.
 
Your situation sounds very much like mine!

Most of my free time are spent with my family, 4 kids, with one carried in front with those Baby Bjorn carriers and sometimes even one behind in a back pack. Rest are in tow. But I always make it a point to carry a camera with me, and like you, I had more than once bashed them with my camera when I bend down to pick them up!

Once I bend down to pick my daughter up, my leica slipped off my shoulder and knocked her head real bad. It proceeded to drop onto the hard floor...my natural reaction was to check my camera first :)... My wife wasn't very pleased. The cam went back to Germany for 6 months.

Anyway, most of my photos are of my family. They are the most meaningful photos to me. Sometimes I may have a chance to snap something nice, maybe at the beach while they are playing, or at gardens etc. But not easy to get nice photos as the mood is not right.

I do hone my photography skills this way though, and when I take leave to do "proper" photography, my skills will not be rusty.

Think of it as photojournalism, long term documentation of family life....and wala! It is now "proper" photography! But my darkroom peers (community darkroom) do find me wierd though, spending so much effort to get family snapshots look right.
 
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For many years I got a lot of what I thought were good photos in many places. Landscapes, documentary, etc. Interspersed were a lot of family photos. About 20 years ago we had a house fire. All the slides were damaged to some extent. Most of the negatives survived, but some were water damaged. All of the photo albums with photos survived. What a treasure!

I agree with all the above posters. Family are the ones you will treasure most in the years to come. Don't miss any opportunity to include them in photos, and take the others as circumstances permit.
 
I always found that "family photos" were different from "art photos." The kids used to help dress up the dog for our annual holiday photo shoot and occasionally they would get involved in other projects - but otherwise getting them to sit for a portrait session required cajolling and bribery.

My usually cooperative wife drew the line at my large format photography in Acadia National Park when we were on a family vacation, hence my involvement with medium format photography. This compromise has endured these many years and kept the marriage intact.

In the days when photography was allowed on the George Washington Bridge, my son, then age 3 in a stroller, refused to hold a lens that I gave him and tossed it over the edge. Luckily, no boats were passing under the bridge, so nobody was injured. It was a long time before I let him hold any equipment.
 
My daughter is only 1 and things were great while she was in the stroller, she'd wait all day while I took a photo. But this week she's progressed to riding on my shoulders which I love because our stroller is a POS, however it's hard to hold a camera steady when you've got an excited one year old playing the bongos on your head...
 
I've had similar issues as the OP (and other posters).
Some of the things I've done/do...
- Got a shoulder bag so I can easily get a camera in & out with one hand.
- Put a wrist strap on my main camera(s) to prevent dropping
- Abandoned neck straps after lens/head interactions.. (particularly when getting my son out of his car seat)

I've managed to get quite a few pictures that I'm happy with while holding my son up with my left arm (he's 2 1/2 but quite small for his age) and holding the camera with the other. I've also used an ErgoBaby sling quite a lot - it's really comfortable and apparently usuable for kids up to about 6 years old!! We're now starting to use a buggy a bit more often (after barely using it since his birth) and I've taken a few shots while crouching down alongside the buggy and talking to him at the same time. Having a supportive wife helps too, I can relate to the sudden running off to grab a shot and then catching up.

The shoulder bag has helped the most as I can quickly put the camera away if I need my hands free and fit in a small toy digger for any boring moments.

This street performance set on Flickr was taken while crouching down talking to my son who was watching from his buggy.

The biggest problem I have now is getting into the right mindset. If I'm on my own I can get into the right frame of mind and develop my confidence a bit more. When I'm with the family I miss out a lot of shots because I don't have the confidence to take them and feel stupid. On the other hand after skipping through a busy city with a toddler singing/shouting, with bits of food smeared on my clothes helped me to stop caring what other people think. :D

Here's a few pics taken whilst carrying a wriggling 2 year old...


 
In 1983 when my son was 6 and daughter was 4 my wife and I took them to London. I bought an Olympus XA for the trip and returned with a fantastic collection of Kodachrome slides of the sights and the children. I kept the XA in my pocket except when I was actually using it which left me with both of my hands free to manage the children. With aperture priority exposure and an easy to use (at the time) rangefinder I was able to take pictures quickly and not slow the rest of the family down.
 
I really have never shot a good pic with family in tow, unless they were in town, but a few miles/streets away, of course.

Pics of the family are of course sometimes very good, but then the fam is not "in tow".

Photography is a lonely hunt for me. I need all my senses to succeed and no one in "tow". I have gone out with other photogs successfully, but they were all doing their thing ...and I was with myself.
 
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It works out well for me. Everyone in my family knows how important photography is to me. The rest is easy.
 
Most of my pictures are of my family. We keep albums with a few pictures from each month (keep getting behind...) and it's great to look through them. Other stuff, well it's nice if I get time, but less important than being with my girls.

We've just come back from a fortnight's holiday and I took the dslr because it's just easier than the film cameras. I'd have preferred something smaller, but left my GX200 on a train a few months ago. I'll make an album with all the family over the next few weeks and we'll all contribute. Is it serious photography - probably not, but it means a lot to us.

As an aside, one night we were frightened from our tent by a lightning storm and took cover in the car. My 8 year old daughter was quite upset that I left the camera in the tent, but it was more important that we got them down than worried about 'stuff'.

Mike
 
I'm just now discovering this predicament, as I have 2 year old twins. We just returned from our first vacation trip, my first outing with my Leica. As others have noted, my kids are now the most important subjects. Up until they came, I had almost zero interest in photographing people; I always felt I was intruding. Yes I shot some "people stuff" for my job as a teacher but left to my own desires, I'd be out in a field or looking for interesting patterns.

Now, however, I see my role as that of family photojournalist and videojournalist. I'm trying to be artistic about it and it is helping me getter better at taking portraits and shooting other people. It's one of the reasons I bought an M6. I don't want All of my photos to have the same digital look....I want my kids to wonder how I made pictures using film and why they look different than digital.

As someone else noted, digital is waaaay easier than RF when kids are your subject. I really missed auto-everything and found myself grabbing for a P&S as a safety net to my M6 for the precious shots. And-again as someone else mentioned-make your kids part of the process. My wife has an album of shots made by our kids. Many are shots of fingers or the floor but every now and then there is one that actually looks like it was purposefully composed.
 
In the last year we have acquired two dogs. Now I take pictures of dogs. I am still adjusting.

Freidlander dragged his family around every summer and made the most of it. They probably hate photograpers! Wait! His daughter married one...
 
pachuco said:
Yep, what he said! Get them trained now or else your family will start to hate your cameras! My girls know that if I stop or dash off to take a photo it will just be a few moments and I will return. :D
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100% agree and having an understanding partner and family is key. Every weekend my wife and I spend at least an entire day out with my daughter (and more time if we can!). For
my wife and I, as we work all week, this is time spent as a family is considered almost sacred. However, there is still leeway for photography.

Generally, we alternate who ultimately decides where we will go
but we both take each other's wants into consideration and for me taking photo's is what I want everytime. So for example I will propose exploring somewhere that may be photographically interesting but will try to find beforehand something in that area that will be fun for my wife and daughter. Alternatively, my wife will think of me when it's her week to decide and let me wander off and lag behind.

This plus the odd day or couple hours I can squeeze off on my own completely is how I do most of my photography. So it's possible but you have to plan ahead and have family who understands and supports you.
 
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