I had a busy weekend, with photography dominating much of it. The centre-piece was Jonathan’s communion day on Saturday – and I was thrilled to be asked to take some photographs for it. I arranged to visit the house on Saturday morning before the family headed off to the church. My hope was to not only get the requisite photographs of Jonathan with his parents, god-parents and grandmother, but also to get some documentary-style photographs of the preparations and goings-on in the house that morning. Essentially I planned on treating it like the morning of a wedding, but instead of a bride my attention would be focused on a 7-year-old boy.
A morning visit to the house made sense for two reasons. Firstly, access to the church was limited, and photography pretty much wasn’t permitted during the mass (probably a good idea seeing as there were about 70 kids and as many sets of proud parents). More importantly I reckoned that it was likely Jonathan would be at his cleanest in the morning, what with the huge bouncy castle waiting in the back garden for when he returned from lunch after the ceremony.
That plan seemed to work well – and I did capture some lovely photos on Jonathan unawares as his tie and his rosette were being put on, and as he opened some presents from his parents. The photograph above, one of the first ones I took, is one of my favourites.
Photographing him unawares was good too because, being a 7 year old, he was able to display an impressive array of expressions whenever he realised there was a camera pointed in his direction – very few of them being natural expressions! Even so those photos are just as much keepers as the candid shots and I still get some lovely more formal family shots before it was time for them to head for the church. I caught up with them again at the school where the kids were being entertained as the parents mingled – another opportunity for some candid images – and when the bouncy castle was in full use later that evening there were one or two photo opportunities to round off the set of images nicely.
The breaks in the day allowed me time to edit and process images as I went, and meant I had a slideshow of images from the day ready to show by Sunday afternoon, and I’m glad to say that was well received. It was time then for me to head off to Photo Fest 2010 to drool over photography equipment that I don’t need but really want, although I showed some restraint and limited myself to a box of sample Permajet paper to see if I can find an alternate paper to that which I currently use for some of the wedding albums I’ll shortly be putting together.
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