grumpy

We really try, at our house, to make a point of not working on weekends. When your work is a family business it's easy to let personal and business blend together to where the business side completely takes over. I struggle with it a lot and still find myself mentioning phone conversations over dinner or suddenly remembering some great idea late in the evening. You know. It's hard to shut it off sometimes. So on weekends we try to take business completely out of the picture and focus on family and personal.

But with all the rain we had recently, we were having trouble finding a sunny workday to photograph the fall patterns, and we finally resorted to working on a sunny Saturday afternoon to get the job done. None of us wanted to be at the studio that day, so I had to laugh when S handed me this note as we were setting up:



Todd wasn't the only one feeling grumpy. My least favorite job is pressing the samples and styling them for the photographs. The mannequin shots are much simpler than the flat shots because it's such a challenge to eliminate all the folds and get the clothes styles lying flat nicely . It all takes much longer than I want it to (I've got plenty of other things I'd rather be doing), and although I've learned a few styling tricks I still get frustrated after a while of fiddling with that one fold that refuses to go away, or the underarm that doesn't lay flat. (Shooting women's clothing flat is the worst--all those curves!)

photo by S

But S wan't grumpy at all. She managed to keep herself busy while we were working, starting out by styling a mannequin with her all-time favorite dress (the Jump Rope, complete with accessories from her dress-up box) and then moved on to positioning and re-positioning her dolls and toys, shooting photos all the while.

photo by S

After that she sat down with the iPad, and I wasn't paying much attention beyond a general awareness that she was making faces for the camera. When I picked it up later I was surprised to fine over 100 photos saved. Here are some of my favorite creative (and disturbing) self-portraits taken by the kiddo.

photos by S

Next time maybe I'll ask her to be the stylist when we shoot. She clearly has more patience for fiddling than I. But she'll need to learn to iron.

By the way, if anyone need to borrow a two-headed 6-year old, or a cyclops 6-year-old with a very pointy head, I think we may have one around here somewhere. She's quite charming!