The last couple weeks, I’ve had this great opportunity to get a few photos of my mom. Blaze and I went to her house for lunch the other day, and I grabbed these shots of them in her garden. My mom has always had the most beautiful, vibrant garden. It was so fun to watch her and Blaze play with the flowers.

My mom is also an incredible real estate agent. She specializes in waterfront properties. In the next month she’s coming out with this great, new marketing piece, so we did a few photos yesterday of her talking with our neighbor Ken. And at one point, she couldn’t stop giggling! I shot away. She’s so beautiful when she laughs.

My whole life people have asked me if my mom was my sister. Isn’t she stunning! And I love her little SOLD jewel pin. 🙂

There are so many great stories I could share about my mom. But the thing that amazes me most is her inner strength. She and my dad have endured unbelievable pain together, and they are still in love like it’s their honeymoon (35 years!). My mom has also walked alongside me through every storm. At times I have felt as if my pain was harder for her than even myself. How does a mother watch their child suffer and not fall apart inside? How do they stay strong and keep loving, resisting the urge to shut down b/c it just hurts to much sometimes?

If I have half the strength my mom has for her children and her marriage, I will be better than okay. (love you mom!)

But why is this post in the category Photography Tips for Moms and titled Move Your Feet? I had an exercise that came to me after working on the first three photos of Blaze and my mom.

It’s called Move Your Feet! I hope you enjoy!

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Exercise for Move Your Feet!

To often we get lazy with all our zoom lenses. I’m so guilty of this! Instead of moving our feet and re-framing a shot we just stay in one place and zoom in and out. Since we’ve got a three day weekend ahead of us, let’s move our feet with the camera! 🙂

1. Have your little one and your spouse, or grandparent, or neighbor, sit down together and interact with each other. This could be looking at flowers, blowing bubbles, tickling each other, any thing that keeps them sitting close in proximity.

2. Bring your aperture down to somewhere between a 2.8 to 3.5. This way you have a nice blurred background, while the image is focused on them.

3. Now take a couple shots of them interacting and move your feet as you re-frame for each shot. As parents we have ask a lot of our kids for a picture. We ask them to say cheese five hundred times. We ask them to move a little to the left or right, bend down a bit, stand up straighter, sound familiar? For this exercise don’t invade their moment at all and move around them. Be an observer of the moment and shoot every little detail and expression.

4. Be mindful of different angles, different points of view, different distances. Don’t zoom, just move in or out, or get up high or down low. For the first shot above I was up on a chair, then I got down and moved in a little closer and framed them tighter so it would feel a bit more intimate.

5. Send me what you get! And have a wonderful, sunny (fingers crossed), three day weekend!

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To learn more about me visit About Me Ra.

For information on Me Ra’s popular photography workshops and DVD series for parents, visit DVD series and “Documenting a Child’s Life.”

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