Me and My Camera

I have realized recently that I have a serious problem...I take way too many pictures. My kids will not be the ones who have no childhood photos. Even child #3! They will be the ones yelling at me to get the camera out of their face.

Christmas of 2009 Doug very generously bought me what I consider to be the best Christmas present ever! A Nikon D80 digital SLR camera. This camera is amazing...no delay. Seriously, this is the best thing ever. It just snaps picture after picture. Which is great for taking pics of the kids who don't hold a pose or smile for more than a half a second. And for anyone who has seen my pictures, that is how I get those awesome action shots of the kids.

Like this one of Jimmy sliding into the end of the pool!

Paige's first surfing experience in Maui!

Doug throwing the kids up in the pool!

The problem with snapping so many pictures in a row, is that at the end of any given month, I can have over 300 pictures to edit! What a painful process that is too. How do I narrow down the sequential action shot I got of Paige jumping into the swimming pool or Alyssa sliding down the enormous slide? No one wants to see 10 pictures in a row of the same thing. Ugh. Trying to pose all 3 children for a group photo. Fun. All anyone ever sees is the final shot. You know I had to edit through at least 20 pictures to get the one where all 3 of them are at least looking at the camera, let alone all smiling.

In this day and age of digital, I realized no one puts together photo albums anymore. Not like my mom has lying around the coffee table or in the cabinet where you can take them out and look through old photos. Now, you have to turn on the computer and pull up a website. Which is fine, but I find is missing something from pulling out a photo book that I can hold in my hand. So I have taken to putting together my pictures in a photo book via Kodak or Shutterfly. I "try" to do a yearly album. As of right now, only 2009 is sitting in my cabinet. 2008, 2010 and 2011 are all in the works. I love having the completed book, but it is sort of a daunting process. I learned the hard way this year, that I really do take a lot of pictures. I had October, November & December left to enter in my 2010 Shutterfly book, when I tried to add more pages and it told me I was at the max. WHAT?!?!? How am I supposed to edit this book down to fit in the last 3 months?? I tried and managed to fit it in, but felt I was sacrificing photos that I didn't want left out. After a frustrating post on Facebook, a friend responded and told me to check out Blurb.com. No max on the amount of pages. I am currently re-doing my 2010 book on Blurb. I hope it turns out nice.

The thing is, I actually love taking pictures (which is why I am hardly in them!). I am fascinated with photography and really want to take a class someday. So I will happily suffer through editing my hundreds upon hundreds of pictures now and for years to come. Because I know someday, my family will appreciate that I always had a camera in their face.