1. I am covered – COVERED – in bug bites. I was going to count them for you so you’d understand what “covered” meant, but I got to 7 just on my left ankle and gave up. I need to invest in some long yoga pants and a pair of Hunters so my poor legs don’t get any more torn up as I roll around in fields, hike through woods and lie in long grass to get a shot. I need a sponsorship from Off bug spray, stat. Or at least a huge can of it to keep in my camera bag for me and my clients.

2. Besides bugs, there are other hazards to shooting in scenic locations. Like when you ask a pregnant lady to take two steps forward and she steps on a snake. Luckily no one ended up in labor (instead, her husband showed my kid how to poke it with a stick) and she didn’t run screaming from the field. I’ve also ruined a pair of shoes by walking right into the ocean to get a shot, not to mention the little girl who followed me into a lake and ended up soaked herself. I’m already dreaming of a nice, snake-free climate controlled studio.

Sit right here, in this long, unmowed grass! I’m sure there’s nothing lurking in it!

3. Cutting down the number of photos I offer is SO HARD. My session package comes with 12 digital files the client gets to choose out of 30-40 edited pictures. I set it up that way so I wouldn’t have to spend a million years editing every picture from a session, since I usually take around 300. AND YET. I can’t bring myself to skip anything that’s even halfway good, so my galleries have 75+ pictures. I’m going to have to a) edit faster and b) learn to cut back so I don’t spend 20 hours on every session (which would mean I’m only making $5 an hour before you even add in travel and insurance and equipment). Yikes.

4. Setting up a business is a lot less fun than just taking pictures. There’s the tax stuff, the legal stuff, graphic design for business cards and web and more (huge thanks to my friend Alena for my logo), packaging, labels, price guides, what to wear inspiration, websites…it’s a lot, is what I’m saying. If I wasn’t already pretty good at this blog stuff I might have quit after the first 24 hours. I don’t know how the really amazing photographers can even be so good at both parts – the part of my brain that loves the artistic elements of photography curls up in a corner and cries every time I have to fill out a tax-exempt certificate.

Don’t even tell me if there’s a typo on my business card design. I am the world’s WORST proofreader (I ordered 200 wedding invitations without a time for the ceremony/reception) (not to mention birth announcements with the WRONG DATE) and I can’t handle it right now.

5. I love it. Despite the bug bites and snakes and crossed-eyes from editing and hours spent staring at different flash drive options and paperwork and having to answer the phone when strange numbers call and OMG TALK TO STRANGERS…I’m so, so exited. I’m getting better with every single shoot (practice makes ever-so-slightly-closer-to-perfect) and the experience is priceless. I’m still sort of stunned anyone would pay me in real actual pennies to do something I enjoy so much. AMERICAN DREAM HELL YEAH.

OK, I swear I’ll blog about something else soon. Who wants to hear about how blue-colored Icees turned my children in MONSTERS yesterday?

 Website / Facebook Page for Ginger Snaps Pictures

I thought I didn’t like newborns, but I was wrong. Well, except for the fact that I could barely walk the next day I was so sore from crouching/squatting/kneeling/bending in weird ways to get the shot. I need to get in better shape for this.

Welcome to August in New England, where the weather cools down juuuuust enough to make life bearable, the days are still super long, and the kids can SENSE that I’m shipping them off to school soon so they start demanding the playground every day.

Sunday:

When you take gymnastics, every wall is a balance beam

The King of All Wild Things demands a rumpus.

Admiring herself in the table reflection. Vanity, thy name is Caroline.

Monday:

HI PIRANHAS! I LOVE YOU! YOU SO SPARKLY!

Want to see him wait patiently? Promise him grilled cheese.

Swinger

Tuesday:

I walked to the grocery store. The halfway point is the hospital where both kids were born.

MORE SWINGING!

Photographer (and model) in training

Wednesday:

Evan decorated her hair during a cat nap

Appropriate scooter attire

Creepy ass princess takes a bath

Thursday:

When you don’t have a photography studio, you improvise. Thank God for sliding glass doors.

Scooter pro already

Photography assistant for my evening maternity shoot

Friday:

She found the shirt she liked and wouldn’t even LOOK at anything else.

I got beat at Princess Chutes and Ladders by a 2 year old. It hurts.

Uh oh, I hear sirens…

Saturday:

TINY PRE-K SCHOOL UNIFORMS I CAN’T EVEN.

Photo editing while the kids watch a surprisingly not terrible fake Pixar movie about sea turtles.

Terribly grainy drive thru photo of the kids attempting the clapping part of the Cups song.

E’s hours are still killing him, but we managed to fit in some family time today, which was super fun. He even put up a curtain rod we’ve been meaning to put up for seven years. Maybe in another seven years we’ll fix the shower door that’s been broken since we moved in!  No, probably not. That clothes pin keeps it closed pretty well.

Every once in a while we get a day together as a family where we DON’T have anything planned but still manage to get ourselves out of the house and into the real world. It’s incredibly rare and easy to scare away if I start saying things like “Have you heard about this place in Maine?” or “I found out about this beach down I-95…” or “SHOPPING”. If I can balance my desire to do ALL THE THINGS with my hard-working husband’s desire to do NONE OF THE THINGS we get a unicorn day.  The trick is…this was all in town. We never went more than 3 miles from our house.

It’s amazing we’ve managed to find enough balance in the past 9 years to stay married. Nine years (and one day) and two gingers and more perfect days to come.

Warning: One bazillion photos to follow.

I love this life <3

I am a liar.

A straight up lying liar who lies with her lying mouth (and keyboard).

Despite saying no less than a dozen times RIGHT HERE on this blog, plus another million times out loud to real life people’s ears, I have decided to turn my photography addiction hobby into a business.

There are a lot of ways I’m justifying this change of heart to myself, but it basically boils down to this: I want to get better. I want to be really, really good at photography. I want to take a million workshops and classes and go to conferences. I want to upgrade my camera and my lenses and my editing software. I want – NEED – as much practice as I can get. And having a business is the only way to do all that.

Unless I win the lottery. Then free camera and tiny American flags for everyone!

Photography is not a cheap hobby. I mean, really, almost nothing is a cheap hobby. Please ignore the giant stash of yarn from my knitting hobby, or the giant pile of cookbooks from my baking hobby, or all the dead plants from my gardening hobby – or really, don’t ignore them. Realize that I’m learning from those ventures. I’ve been consistently interested in and learning about taking pictures since I got my Nikon right before Evan’s 1st birthday. I’m not jumping into this. I’m not even going to start charging right away. I’m going to try to do it right, with lots of advice and help from people who can say MISTAKE MISTAKE MISTAKE when I start making stupid decisions.

Please, feel free to roll your eyes at me. Call me just a mom with a camera. You can’t make me feel more unsure of myself than I already do, even though I have plenty of awesome friend who are lovely and encouraging, even if I know they’re thinking “I knew you were a liar!” behind my back. For every second I think “I don’t have to be the BEST EVER to do this – I just have to have work people think is valuable!” a voice in my head says “Valuable? Bish, please, who do you think you’re kidding? If you give a blind monkey a camera he’d get some lucky shots sometimes too.”

So really, I’m somewhere in between. Not there, but on the road. And I guess I just need a little help paying the tolls.

I haven’t been blogging this week because I’ve been editing pictures, and I realize I like doing that almost as much as I like writing words and stories and maybe also just a tiiiny bit more some days? Because it’s 100 effing degrees and I can’t think straight but damn if my kids aren’t the cutest little practice models and taking pictures of them makes me happy.

p.s. I think I’m going to call the business Ginger Snaps. Get it?

p.p.s. I also think I’m going to try to talk people into letting me do what I do know, just with their families. Go to the park, on a picnic, the aquarium, feed the ducks, the fair, whatever. I’ll just tag along and act like the paparazzi – with maybe a gentle nudge into the best light and cutest poses. Stupid/not stupid?