As you may be aware, I frequently photograph my children. There’s been substantial evidence on this blog that I manage to get that right a lot of the time. But lately, Gabe has been making himself a harder target. Lately, he can’t be tied down to any one spot long enough for his father to get the camera ready. He’s a mover and a shaker. He’s got things to do. So many of my photos end up looking like this:

It’s not horrible. In fact, it’s kind of cute. But it clearly isn’t the image that I was looking to take. For a more specific example, let’s examine the following photo. Gabe had been sitting on Abigail’s lap and she had been reading him a story. Here’s my photo of that adorable event:

And then there’s that time they sat next to each other in an empty cardboard box, looking cute.

Or the time I tried to get a picture of him in his Peter Pan hat.

I really tried hard to get this one. I mean, he’s just a kid wearing a hat. It’s not like he needs to sit in one place for the picture to work, like the box or a lap. No, he can run around and I just need to capture one instance of him standing still. Here he is throwing the hat over the rail on the stairs.

Sometimes you do get a good picture, even though it wasn’t the one you were looking for. Take this one here, which was supposed to be a picture of Gabe kissing the Madeleine doll:

Or this picture of Gabe leaning against Maggie. (Of course, I did get the shot I was looking for here.)

Maybe what I should really do is just let him take his own pictures. He’s pretty good at it after all.

I’ll leave you with a picture he took of his mother, albeit inadvertent. Although I’m not sure how many of his picture are actually advertant.