Family Photo Shoot Co-op

Since my husband or I are always the ones taking photos of our family, we have very few pictures of the four of us together.  And the ones we do have were taken spontaneously by a friend on their phone ... and while great, don't lend themselves well to printing.

A few weeks ago, while chatting with friends at one of our kids' birthday parties, this issue came up; it turns out we aren't the only ones with this problem!  As we talked, someone had the idea of getting together one weekend to photograph each other's families.  The idea grew, and this past weekend two of my colleagues and I got together with our families for an hour on Sunday afternoon to take family portraits of each other.

It helped that one of my colleagues is our school's photography teacher, and the other an avid amateur photographer.  But with today's great digital cameras and user-friendly photo editing programs, there's no reason you can't organize a family photo shoot "co-op" too.  I hope that this will be just the first of such projects, and that in the future, I'll have developed my own photography skills enough to be able to get on the other side of the lens myself!

Note: my friend used Adobe Photoshop Elements to touch-up our photos, and his mini-lesson made me want to buy the software myself!

Art Project - An Ocean Apart

My dear friend Lisa and I have started a photography project, inspired by A Year of Mornings. Every morning for a month we are each going to take a photo of an aspect of our lives - hers in Toronto, mine in Turkey. At the end of one month we're going to make a book out of all the photos, each day's moments displayed side by side.

Here are our first photos, taken yesterday, 11 June.

Interestingly, we both took pictures of 'bits' of our families: Lisa photographed one of her daughters; in my photo I've captured my son's hand, my feet and the back of my husband's head. I can't wait to see whether our respective pictures will highlight the differences or the similarities between our lives!