June 23 Photo: Movement

Today’s photo is a bit of a cheat, because I didn’t take it. (And I can’t lie about that fact, because I am clearly in the picture.) But since movement is really difficult to depict and since I love the way this photo captures it, I’m going to give my husband credit for taking it and post it anyway.

Most of the photographs that I take trying to capture movement just end up as blurs. (And with my kids, most of the photographs that I take are trying to capture movement!) I can’t blame it on my camera, because my husband used my camera to take this photo. Maybe he knows some special setting that I don’t (likely) or maybe he just has a better eye than I (extremely likely). But whatever technique he used, this photo captures movement exactly the way I wanted to capture it.

If you look closely at the lower left-hand side of the photograph, right under the surface of the water you can just make out the flesh-colored blur that is my son immediately post-belly-flop. He loves to stand on the side of the pool and hurl himself in, spread-eagled, in order to make the maximum splash possible. It takes an amazingly quick shutter finger to catch him mid-air, since he gives zero warning that he’s about to jump, so most of the photos of him jumping into the pool look a lot like this one.

And that’s a pretty good illustration of life with a 2-1/2-year-old boy: You rarely see the event, just the aftermath. You find the Legos strewn all over the living room after the 3-foot-tall tower crashes down. You mop up the puddle of soapy water on the bathroom floor after the tub toys have had an epic (and splashy) battle. You rescue the child with his head trapped between the bars of the fence after he squeezes the rest of his body through (photo below for those of you who missed it).

Yup, life with a 2-1/2 year old boy is pretty much constant movement – yours, his, toys, and time. It’s nice to have a photograph every now and then to freeze the action so you don’t miss it completely. Because you can’t stop the movement of the child or of the clock.