TIPS FOR DIY FAMILY PHOTOS

This post is sponsored by Disney Baby. I'll be joining the Disney Baby blogging team next month, and look forward to sharing these kinds of stories (projects/ideas/etc) with you over there. Stay tuned for more details!

i love this photo. my beautiful friend kaitlyn took it for us when huck was just five weeks old. we were lucky enough to snag a slot with her and we even had the baby in time and they were our first real family photos. mama, daddy, baby. they came out real good. 

since then we've been supremely blessed with many many many opportunities to have professionals take family photos for us, but sometimes it's fun to take our own, selfie style. i like the haphazard way they look, the funky angles, the bad focus. i love the stories they tell, and the out-of-the-ordinary way they came to be. here are a few of our favorite DIY family photos. hopefully they'll inspire some lazy, impromptu family photos of your own. 

the series. it's impossible to get all of you in one shot when one of you is always behind the camera. we usually try to trade off and get a few incomplete family photos that, when put together, tell a cute little family story. and look at how fat that huck was. i forget how pudgy that tummy was. 

the self timer. i love self-timer photos. they are so cheesy. we have about fifty variations of this photo, with either a dog head clouding the shot, or someone blinking, or the camera was crooked, or i was too blurry because i couldn't get back to the bed in time . . . somewhere around the twentieth shot huck lost a sock under the covers. peter pan refused to pose without his stuffed cow. brandon has lazy saturday morning hair. i wouldn't have this photo any other way. 

the mirror selfie. i hate that word, selfie. but i am a huge fan of self portraits, i don't get the bad rap they get. this is my philosophy: see a mirror? take a photo. spur of the moment, in whatever you're wearing, about to do whatever it is you're about to be doing. don't give it too much thought, just do it. this is one of my all-time favorite stupid photos. huck and his goofy parents. we were in the lobby of our building on 69th street, about to look at the apartment we'd eventually move into four months later. i remember we ended the afternoon at the playground on the swings. there was another girl there wearing overalls who, granted, was maybe three. brandon called me "old macdonald" all day long.  when i said, "quick, picture!" brandon instinctively stuck his bum out. the look on huck's face says it all. "oh brother." how can you not love a photo like this?

here's another one of my favorites. i'm so glad pooh bear made it into this shot, he was a big part of our family for about a month or so. brandon was wearing our picnic blanket like that all day and for whatever reason it made me laugh all the way into the park. we were big into our netflix account at the time, deeply ensconced in a secret queue war. i'd put a romantic comedy at the top, and then somehow tron would make it's way home and i knew that brandon had been messing about with the priority order behind my back. one time i bumped a miley cyrus movie to the top to get back at him. surprisingly, that movie made me cry. these are the kind of bizarre details i'll remember the rest of my life when i look at this photo. and isn't that sort of nice?

the next disney baby post:

on sleeping (on not sleeping)