The Joys of Parenthood #2: The Family Photo

I have never quite appreciated the subtle skills of the Sears portrait studio staff until now. At first glance it just appears that a professional has come in to set up the lighting, focus, and field of view just to then hand the camera off to the lowly high school student looking to make a few bucks. However, I now realize that this misses one important component of the whole picture taking experience: crowd control.

With our new baby has come the need to document all of his happenings and all of the new people that he meets, most importantly the grand parents and family. Below are the series of pictures that it took to get one reasonable family portrait with four grown adults and one baby. In total I think this took about five minutes but likely resulted in about 5 years being taken off of the end of my life.


Oops. I am actually more than a head taller than Kristin. Do over.


Crap. The 10second delay wasn't on.


This picture was supposed to be sans dog. Please move Rogger. Anna get your head out of the picture.


MOM! Yes the baby is crying. Please focus on the camera for 10seconds. Its JUST ten seconds.


There it is. Near perfection. All eyes open and looking at the camera. No dogs. My head of not chopped off. Awesome picture.

A special thanks to the sandwich maker at Panera that snapped this picture for us:


A few eyes were closed but this is a great memory nonetheless. If it took five tries to get four adults lined up, I did not want to pull this generous sandwich artist away from his work for the time it would take to simply get all eight pairs of eyes open for this shot.