Happy Valentines Day

Chris Watkins Photography, Gainesville, Fl.

As a photographer, the most precious gift that I can give to anyone is the gift of memories. Preserving life’s most precious memories is what makes my job so cool and important. It is especially important to me when the gift is for someone that I love. This Valentines Day, after years of begging, I finally took some proper Valentines Day photos of my beautiful daughter. I know that this is a professional blog for my portrait and wedding photography business, but again I am only human and I can not resist occasionally posting at least some photos of my beautiful daughter.

I will be the first one to admit that my daughter is the most challenging subject that I have ever photographed. Yes, I taught her well. When she sees a camera, especially if I am the one holding it, she runs away! As funny as this is, it is also very frustrating because I have literally thousands of photographs of her running away from me. What I have discovered over the last three and a half years, especially when photographing children, is that you have to make photography fun.

When you make photography fun, everyone wins. As a photographer, you get genuine natural expressions and you get the ability to capture real moments and real emotion. And capturing emotion is what photography is all about. For this session, I enlisted the help of my great grandmother to shower rose petals over my daughter. To keep things interesting I got my daughter to throw the rose petals as high as she could, and she loved it. This was by far the most fun and successful portrait photography session that I have ever had with my daughter.