Why everyday? Really? Everyday?

Yes. Everyday.

Why is it important to document your loved ones everyday? What if you don’t have a fancy camera? What if you don’t have little babies at home all day to photograph? What if your kids won’t smile for your camera? What if it seems like your days are the same for weeks and months and years on end?

Still do it. Please.

All of your photographs don’t have to have people smiling perfectly at the camera…that photo above was shot in the backseat of my husband’s car on the way to dinner. I turned around, saw that they were looking cute and that the light was great and I told them to squish together. I love that my oldest is holding onto his brother’s shirt. I love that they indulged me. They do this because I ask…a lot. But many of my favorite photos are of my three (or however many I’ve got with me at the time) walking away, looking at something other than the camera or just them doing their own thing. Sometimes (a lot of times) my photos don’t even have people in them (I spend a lot of time without my kiddos with me as they’re in school or at practices all the time). That just means that I need to get creative.

Sometimes I need to force myself to take photos to keep my creativity up…why would I do that? Why is it important to keep shooting even if you don’t have something picture perfect to photograph? For me, it helps me to look around and try to see something awesome in the ordinary.

In the instagram (and facebook) world Thursdays are #throwbackthursday and sometimes I participate and often I forget (my mom is really great at posting pics, and I love that!) Yesterday I happened to see an old photo of my oldest and couldn’t help but post it. Before I picked my kids up I went to grab the photo to take a photo of it to post and decided to wait. I wanted to push myself to do something more creative than just a photo of this photo. I loved what we ended up with. Just a simple camera phone pic on the front porch (great tip…know where the good lighting is in and around your home at all times to get quick well lit photos at the drop of a hat). I love how it shows his hand up close and that you can see his smiling grin in the background…this was a more exciting image to me and I’m so glad that I stopped and tried to push myself a bit.

The image of my daughter (also from Thursday afternoon) was again the product of just trying to think a little outside of the box. She got in the car after school and I noticed she had a sticker on her shirt. She explained the story behind it and I loved the way it looked on her shirt…to me, I thought it needed a photo. Because her handwriting was cute, the sweatshirt had hearts on it and why not? So after the quick photo of my son, I had her come outside onto the porch (remember…know where the good, indirect lighting is) and I started taking pics (again, with my camera phone). The pics of her smiling at the camera with a white rectangle on her shirt just weren’t doing it for me…so I focused in on the sticker and when I did that, she looked down at what I was doing and I got her sweet smile…and not much else. This made a quick and easy photo so much stronger and exciting to me. And it told a story.

The collage below is a quick 16 image collage of some of my instagrams from September. When taking your own storytelling images of your everyday, try and really think about the angles and composition of your images. How can you shift your perspective to get a more creative shot? A photo of my kids in their matching Seahawks shirts would have been great, but a photo of them as they were taking their selfie to post on instagram tells a more complete story.

As you’re documenting your everyday I challenge you to try and think a little differently. And push yourself to take photos everyday. They won’t all be winners, but they all tell a story and they’re important to who you are.

This post is part of a 31 day series. Read the first post here about documenting everyday life and see a list of all of the other posts in the series.