family

Grandma’s House

Grandma Williams died on December 6.

Since then, we’ve been picking up the pieces – some figurative, some literal.

For instance, we adopted Grandma’s dog, Bruno. We had to take her cable box back and shut off her mobile phone.

We found Kodak Carousels with thousands of film slides in a closet, carefully labelled and organized by subject and year: Disney World, Kentucky horse shows, Alaska, and family dinners. Like my own film archiving project, this one will keep me busy, getting all those positive film slides scanned. 

Walking around the empty house, we remember what it was like at Christmas, full of family and noise. There are the awesome Star Wars curtains, the hundreds of puzzles, and the dinnerware that hasn’t changed in decades.

Nothing has really changed. And yet everything has. 

We used to sit by Grandma at church, up in the balcony, and go to lunch afterwards – usually Bob Evans or Olive Garden. 

She was a constant in our lives, our kids’ lives. Every birthday, Mother’s Day, or ice cream social.

There were summer Sundays on Lake Michigan, at our usual spot in the South Haven state park. 

Now: an empty house, tax records going back to the 1960s, and all this stuff.

She was an incredible woman – strong and proud. After 90-plus years, there’s a lot of legacy and love to sort through now, too.

So here we are, at Grandma’s house.

 

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Family Photography

Monkey in the middle

This New York Times profile on photographer Sally Mann – one of my family photography heroes – is one of those periodic reminders of the importance of making photos at home. 

Sally became well-known (and, sadly, controversial) because of her intimate family portraits. She has since moved on to landscapes and other forms of photography, especially as her children became adults.

I feel that transition happening in my own life, too. For the past 10 years, since my daughter Madelyn was born, family photography has been my main creative outlet: photos around the house, family vacations, and capturing moments as my kids get older. 

In the past year, however, I have had more time for creative projects outside of my family and home. I rebooted my Artists In Jackson project, I’m taking more time to take little adventures around my community, and I’m revisiting projects that I worked on long ago. 

It feels good! And I have a metric that shows my return to other kinds of photography – my Lightroom photo count:

Number of photos taken by year

Over the years, my photo count has decreased. Now, for the first time in a long time, I’m taking more photos than I have in years past – by a lot. That feels good, too. 

But despite doing more photography, I haven’t lost sight of the importance of my own household. The kids are more mobile and active these days, but I still try to steal a shot when I can.

Family photography is still the most important kind of photography. It’s just that now, I have found my way back to other projects. 

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Photography Microadventures

Irish Hills, Michigan

Back when I was single with no kids, taking off on a Saturday drive to take photos was easy: I just got up and did it.

Now, with a family and more responsibilities, spending time out taking photos has been harder to do. Many of my weeknight activities involve taking kids to their lessons or school functions. There are doctor appointments and musical practice. Someone has to do the dishes and mow the lawn. And my wife and I have a relationship to nurture. 

So what to do? How can a busy person support a photography hobby with such a constrained schedule?

My advice: take opportunities when you can, and don’t feel bad about it. 

The concept of microadventures has gained popularity in recent years, where you take a weekend, or a day, and head out into the world to do…something — anything out of the ordinary. 

For photography, it could be as simple as:

  • Waking up early and hitting the road to photograph a landscape or subject before the rest of your household even knows you’re gone. I do this on Saturdays when I know the weather and the light are optimal. Often, I’m back before everyone’s even had breakfast.
  • Taking advantage of work trips. I do this a lot with conferences, where you can head to a city across the country and wander into town to make pictures. Bring a camera with you on your next work trip and you can create something in the quiet moments.
  • Grab an hour when and where you can and check something off your to-photograph list. If we have nothing planned for the week, I’ll take a break after dinner and photograph a subject I’ve noticed during my travels around town. I’ll even stop somewhere on the way to pick up the kids (from the grandparents, from school, etc.) and capture something I’ve noticed. 

This could be true of any creative project. The point is: make your own adventures whenever you can. 

And for big projects? I communicate those with my family and ask for time to complete them. That may mean a few hours here and there during the week, but as long as you’re upfront about expectations and schedules, it shouldn’t be difficult. 

If it’s important, find the time.

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Acadian National Park

2025 Vacation: Acadia National Park

I had the chance to visit Acadia National Park almost 20 years ago. It’s where I climbed my first mountain, and I was excited to show off the park to my family.

Acadia is not the biggest national park, but for sheer variety, it has a lot to offer: great hiking, mountains, oceanfront scenery, with ponds and rivers galore.

The park helped me appreciate the benefits of Canon’s lighter mirrorless kit. When you’re hiking up and down mountains, the portability of the EOS M series was definitely a benefit. And the image quality never suffers.

It’s a shame Canon discontinued the M series. With the R series, cameras got bigger, lenses got bigger, and apart from a few of the APS-C and point-and-shoot bodies, there’s nothing like the M series in the lineup anymore. Trips like this highlight the need for a smaller kit.

We worked our way around the park and by mid-day, we finished up and headed into Bar Harbor, Maine, for dinner.

Shot on the Canon EOS M and the EF-M lenses.

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Marshville, Nova Scotia

2025 Vacation: Marshville, Nova Scotia

The first leg of our two-week vacation was along the north shore of Nova Scotia, in a little town called Marshville. It was a total throw-a-dart-at-a-map-and-hope-it-works-out location.

It totally worked out.

We’re an AirBNB/Vrbo family, and we try to get cabins on the water. This one was close enough – a short walk down a drive, then a set of stairs down a bluff, and we were oceanside.

The neighborhood was filled with quaint sea cottages, many of which proudly displayed their Canadian pride.

As always, I took the first day or two to explore the cabin and the neighborhood, exploring the light where I could find it.

Marshville was a good launching point for all our adventures. We had plenty to see along Nova Scotia’s North Shore, and it was centrally located to easily make our future drives to Halifax and Cape Breton.

Every morning, the kids watched the tide ebb and flow. And every evening, we went down to the beach to see the sunset. 

We saw the ocean in California last year, but not like this – not every day, and not this close to shore. After the kids overcame their fear of the little brown jellyfish and embraced the cold northern water, the ocean became part of their spiritual rhythm. 

The Canon M6, paired with either the EF-M 22mm f/2, EF-M 32mm f/1.4, or the M kit zoom, made for a light and satisfying travel kit.

We spent our first evening getting to know the place. The next day, we’d travel to a local beach to really take in the ocean view.

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Kids These Days

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These days, it’s easy to appreciate whoever came up with, “Children should be seen and not heard.”

It’s barbaric, of course, especially now that we recognize children are miniature people. They have thoughts and feelings. They’re more than field workers or inconveniences.

Still, with every minute of every day spent with the kids, it’s an adjustment. Before, we worked all day, and we spent time with the kids in the evenings or on the weekends. Now it’s all day, every day.

Soon there will be no school work, no Zoom class meetings, no nothing. Just unstructured summertime. Luckily we’re in a nice time of year when staying outside and playing is a possibility. 

Outside also means avoiding social media and the news. The kids don’t have any idea what’s going on in the world today. If they did, it’d be difficult to answer their questions. The virus? They know about that. They know its name. Everything else? Blissfully unaware. 

Working as I do, each day at the kitchen table, I can watch them play in the backyard and live out their own adventures. They are little people, and as much as that old English saying makes me laugh, I don’t believe it. I didn’t get to hear it so much before. It’s good to hear them out there, playing and laughing and crying.

Inside, I can barely work because of my anxiety at the state of the world. Better for them to be outside. 

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Disney Crazy

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My wife’s family is Disney Crazy – movies, merchandise, housewares, everything. And that includes a bi-annual trip to Disney World in Orlando, Florida.

I skipped the last trip, in 2018, but went along this year. That seems sensible to me – once every four years. Two years is a bit much.

This time, though, my wife brought the whole family: cousins, in-laws, brothers and sisters. In all, 14 of our people spent a week in the most Magical Place on Earth™.

And while I’m cynical about the whole thing, when you’re there, the magic really does affect you. Well, that and the 80-degree weather and sunshine. You do get swept up in the excitement. Having small children sure helps.

We found new things to do, and filled our schedules. There was the new Star Wars park to explore, and new rides, and a few days off just to relax, swim, and shop a bit. Us grown-ups even got a chance to leave the kids with the grandparents and go out for a night of adult fun.

I first came to Disney World when I was five years old, and visited again in high school and my young professional life. Last time I took the trip, in 2016, I explored the parks photographically, with my family, seeing these wonderlands with new eyes.

This year, I mainly focused on the kids and creating memories for them, but I did find a few opportunities to see the park as a photographer, looking for those little quiet moments in all the hub-bub.

There’s a lot to see.

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Flower Girls

Flower Girls

Here’s another quick project: Grab the kids, find a trail, and start shooting.

I used to do more of this type of work, coming up with a simple idea and grabbing the family to execute it. Now, with a busy life, it’s harder to think this way.

Thank goodness for my wife, who saw a sunny evening and a trail full of spring flowers and got us out of the house.

Small, lovely steps.

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Leaving a ‘Legacy’

It’s true: I take a lot of photos of our kids.

So many pictures that, when it comes round to the end of the year and I work on our annual photo book, I can never fit all the photos I take.

It makes me wonder: what will the kids remember? Which photos will the kids treasure? Will they care at all? Or will they see dad as a fussy ol’ snapshot artist?

Hard to say! But I keep snapping away, regardless.

Here’s what I do know: when my mom passed away, I didn’t care about getting anything else but our photo albums from when we were kids. I poured over those albums growing up, and in a lot of ways those pictures helped anchor my memories. As a kid, the past is fuzzy. But with photos, it can come to life.

Maybe that’s all the legacy we need.

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Hobbit Place

This is usually our springtime ritual, heading to the Hobbit Place, grabbing flowers and thinking about landscape decorations.

For this year, we went full autumn: mums, pumpkins, decorative gourds – the whole thing. As a Tolkien fan, I love the greenhouse’s name. As a person who cares about their yard, I appreciate their selection.

Tick tock goes the beat of the year. On and on we slide into fall.

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Twelve Times

Riley

Our youngest, Riley, turned one this week.

So this week, like every month this past year, we’ll set her up in a little photo shoot, and take a bunch of pictures. Every month is labelled with a little sticker we put on her. Doing this, we have 12 portraits of our baby through the year.

At the minimum, 12 good photos of your baby in a year is pretty good. I shoot a bunch more of her, but I know that each month we at at least get one, and we make it a ritual: change her outfit, the backdrop, put props in, that kind of thing.

The fun part? Going through and seeing the photos sequentially, from the start. There’s our Riley, one year ago, with a hint of who she would be 12 months later. There’s the first time she sat up on her own. There’s the one with the drool…

I’d like to say we kept our ritual going with the other two kids after they passed 12 months. But babies really are easier to pose, and goodness knows I take plenty of the other two doing their kid things. It’s fine. At least we have those first 12 months.

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An Easy Decision

An Easy Decision

My heart hurts. Another school shooting, another reason for our kids (and parents!) not to feel safe, and another bunch of nothing gets fixed.

Aiden has to do school drills to practice being safe if something terrible happened. In my day, drills were for tornadoes – natural occurrences that you can’t control. Our parents had bombing drills, and we all decided that hiding from nuclear weapons wasn’t a thing we wanted to do. Hence: arms control.

Today, drills are for something we can control, but fail to do anything about. It’s silly.

Glad to see the Florida students shame our politicians, and (hopefully) many Americans who feel our kids aren’t worth protecting.

I’m pro hunting, pro owning a shotgun or a handgun – but also pro safety and controlling these killing machines from the crazies. We can have both.

Most of all, I’m in favor of kids over guns. It should be an easy decision, America.

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Make And Take

Leave it to me to schedule our Family Art Studio session for the snow storm weekend.

But so it went. We drove to Ann Arbor, braving the highway traffic and slick conditions, to spend the day making art at my work.

This was the boy’s first trip to an art museum, and he had a lot of questions. Were the statues real? Why can’t you touch the art? That bust of George Washington – where’s the rest of his body? Why was that girl so hairy?

We took inspiration from Japanese graphic design and made our own poster out of cut-out shapes of colored paper. It was us and six other families – half of what was scheduled to show up.

“The difference between your art on the fridge and these drawings is that there’s a frame around them, and they’re hanging in a museum,” I said.

I hope he took the day to heart.

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Before the Break

Sure, it’s nice – getting a week between Christmas and New Year’s off as a freebie vacation week. That week is one of the many benefits of working in higher ed.

Except when you’re sick.

It hit us the weekend before Christmas: a scratch throat, a groggy unease, and sinus pain that felt like continual just-before-you-sneeze agony. Then, from Christmas day to just this week, a persistent sickness. It didn’t ruin the holidays, but it certainly wasn’t fun.

Maybe it’s a good thing I had that week off. But there are better ways to spend a vacation than homebound misery.

So I took the usual Christmas morning photos of the kids opening presents. Other than that, and despite some big photo plans I had, I just didn’t get much done. Instead, I’ll share some pre-Christmas fun in the playroom with the kids.

Before the snow fell. Before the presents showed up under the tree. Before the misery.

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Home for the Holidays

Everything is different this year: new house, new family dynamic, and heck – even a new place for our Christmas tree.

This time we went to the well-known family name, the one you pass on the highway with the big sign. And wouldn’t you know it, the nice weather met us there and made for a fun family outing (and great photos). It’s one of those holiday traditions we look forward to every year.

Like Christmas Vacation, right? Everyone loves that movie. You can’t help but think of the Griswolds every time you head out to the countryside to grab a Christmas tree.

Plenty of things change, but we try to keep these kinds of things steady.

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The Fear Takes Over

Riding the Party Bus

When my daughter Madelyn was born, everything changed.

And not just for the better. As a parent, you can’t help but worry about your kid. Will they be safe? Will they be healthy? Will they always be around? I noticed my brain going down some very dark alleys after I had kids, often despite my best efforts. “Don’t worry,” I told myself. “Not much you can do about the unknown.”

Except my thoughts went to those dark places anyway. They still do.

Photography is a great way to show your love and appreciation of your family members. But to some, it can be a way to manage the anxiety of raising a child. I feel this often. If I’m photographing my kids, that means I’m with them. If I’m with them, that means I can prevent the bad stuff from happening.

That’s silly, of course. Bad stuff can still happen, even if I’m there. Photography is merely the excuse to keep the dark thoughts away, if only for a little while.

In Caspar Claasan’s project, he mentioned that things got better over time. If that’s true, than the photos I make now will remind me of the fears I had from an earlier period.

That will have to be good enough.

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The Legend Of

It wasn’t my pick. Honest.

No, it was the boy saying, “I want to be a bokoblin for Halloween” that got the whole train started. Now, we’re doing the Legend of Zelda costumes – the whole lot of us.

The forecast looks chilly for trick or treating tonight. Let’s hope our mostly-homemade costumes keep us warm.

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Summer Vacation

This was it – the last big adventure of the summer, saved until the end.

The trick was lining up our northern Michigan vacation with the grandparents’ schedules. One pair in Mackinaw City for a few days, and the other in Petoskey for the second half. Help with adventures, babysitting, and overnights. With three kids, taking one to spend time with the grandparents relieves a bit of the strain.

Not that this was stressful. No, northern Michigan moves at a vacation pace. Water, and sky, and enough green and blue to make both of our major state university fans happy.

(It’s Go Blue season, just to be clear.)

This close to Lake Michigan, and this close to all those forests – it’s a proper goodbye to nice weather, and water, and wilderness for a while. We even said goodbye to the trout sunning themselves at an honest-to-goodness fish hatchery, complete with a bald eagle waiting, and watching, in the canopy above.

It’s what’s so great about living in our state. A few hours in every direction and you’re next to a giant freshwater lake and enough nature to forget that it’ll all be buried in snow and ice in a few months.

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Toledo Zoo

It was supposed to be an easy-going four-day vacation – a quick trip down to Toledo, Ohio (the Midwest’s premier getaway destination, naturally) and visit the zoo on Friday. Our first trip with the three kids.

What we got instead was a near-drowning in the hotel pool, a scary trip to the emergency room, and a rainy zoo day.

Despite all that, we made the best of it. We took an impromptu trip back to the Toledo Zoo on Saturday, when it was warm and sunny, and did it right. We also met some friends at Tony Packo’s and enjoyed some good Hungarian hot dogs, coney style.

Easy-going? Not so much. But we got out of the house and started the vacation season in earnest.

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Born An Artist

Born An Artist

We never had to prompt either kids to pick up a crayon and start doodling.

They both do it totally on their own. The crayons are always there, there’s always paper handy – they just need to sit down and scribble. It’s what they do.

That’s a good feeling, to have both kids take to art and music. It’s our fault, of course, as parents, because we surround ourselves with such things. It’s what we do.

As a kid, my parents always had music going in the house, and we loved to doodle and color in coloring books. But neither of my parents really did music (like play an instrument), or did art (as a hobby, say). I took their small spark and ran with it.

It’s exciting to think about what these kids will do.

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Let’s-A Go

My wife does a great job at themed birthday parties. Both kids have never wanted for a fun, tied-together celebration, from Lego to Batman to Daisy Duck.

This year, the boy turned six, and picked Mario for his birthday theme. So, as usual, we went all out.

My wife is big Disney fan. Her family goes to Disney World every few years, she knows all the movies and songs, her mom collects all the figurines. They’re a Disney Family.

Nintendo is my Disney, being a video game kid and growing up with Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda. For this party, I was in my element:

Birthday party

And sure, all the kids had fun with the theme, too.

Little kids in Mario mustaches? The best.

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Saturday In the Park

We wait all winter for days like this: sunny, decently warm, fresh breeze blowing.

In our new neighborhood, we’re surrounded by parks and playgrounds. Sparks Park – kind of Jackson’s own Central Park – is a block or two away, and we have several schools in the street next to ours, lousy with playground equipment. Our old neighborhood was very walkable, but it’s nice being so close to all this fun.

Now, when we go on walks around the neighborhood, the kids beg to go to one of the playgrounds. I have a feeling we’ll spend a lot of time here.

And that’s great. For today, we’re just happy to be outside.

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Riley May

I’ve spent the last week enjoying our new baby daughter, Riley May Lawrence.

She arrived early Tuesday morning, purple and gooey, and has been either eating or sleeping since. We got back home on Friday afternoon, and took most of the weekend getting settled: spending time with the other two kids, getting our routine down, and taking care of the baby.

This baby – the c-section, the hospital stay, our sleep cycle – has been a smooth one. We’re lucky. We’re also lucky to get lots of help from grandparents and friends. And our new house is prepped enough to make the living part easy.

I’m taking this next week off of work, too (the first time in my working life I’ve had two consecutive weeks off), to help with the kids, enjoy the new baby, and help my wife around the house. Plus photo making, of course.

Life gets really simple when you have one big (or tiny, as it were) priority. I find it surprisingly relaxing to tune out everything else and concentrate on this crying, squeaking little person.

Everything else takes a distant second.

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Using Your Family As Photo Subjects

What Do You Dream About?

A generous On Taking Pictures listener gifted me a copy of Sally Mann’s Immediate Family for our gift exchange during the holidays, and it has me thinking about family photos. As a parent, family photography came naturally. Is there a better way to capture your kids growing up?

Unless you’re a parent, a lot of this won’t be clear. But for those parents out there, you instinctively know how important family photography is.

In her memoir, Hold Still (which is a great read, by the way – give me a memoir over an autobiography any day) Mann tells her photography students:

Photograph what is important to you, what is closest to you, photograph the great events of your life, and let your photography live with your reality.

“Your reality” could include dreams, or emotions, or flowers by a big window. For parents, “what is closest” is often our children, especially at first. And what is photography if not to capture something before its gone?

Photographing the family has a few side benefits. For one, it’s just good practice. Think about shooting something every day, week after week, and then add in that you have a readily-available subject who more or less cooperates. Want to try out a new technique? Want to test a new piece of gear? Need to sketch out an idea? “C’mere, kiddo. Stand here.”

Second, while I love a good snapshot, I love making art with my family even more. I put feelings into the photos I make of my family, and that lends them a greater weight. Maybe they don’t mean anything to the casual observer. And maybe the kids, themselves, will look back and wonder why I made such a fuss. But with my family photos, I’m the audience (okay, maybe the grandparents, too).

Can I show someone that I love them by taking their photo? I believe so. That’s the ultimate reason I photograph my family. All you need is love, as John Lennon sang. It’s the ultimate personal project.

So now, I look for examples of good family photos, a genre I would never had been interested if it weren’t for exploring image making with my own kids. If I get the same sense of fondness and artistic expression – artists living with their reality, as Mann says – then the photographer has succeeded.

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