This event was actually extra special because Jim is my Grandpa. Though this was not, of course, a paid shoot, I still brought my camera and wanted to capture everything that I could. Prior to this trip, I was super excited because all of the grandkids (I'm one of 5 grandkids) got together and put together a photo book documenting memories that spanned our lifetimes, from the time we were infants to our now adult years.
My grandpa is a funny guy. He's from New Jersey, he's incredibly musically gifted, and he still uses GarageBand to create songs and covers of his favorite music. We even took some time to record some music while I was in town.
I think the recording and the photo book were some of his favorite parts of the whole weekend, and it got me thinking about the value of photos throughout our lives. Putting the book together, it dawned on me that my grandfather was actually one of the reasons I fell in love with photography from a young age. He's the reason I learned to swim in the ocean, one of the reasons I loved to sing, and so much of who I am was passed down from him in ways that I don't think I had ever really stopped to consider.
And then there were all of these photographs.
Honestly, they weren't anything to write home about from a technical standpoint. My grandparents' house has a really odd mixture of warm-toned and cool lighting that I felt was there simply to torture me as a photographer as I edited. Some photos were poorly exposed, there was clutter. Some had people looking in completely different directions. There were plenty that I probably would have deleted if they had been taken at a professional session.
But looking through them in the gallery from the trip, none of that mattered. They were photographs of us celebrating the life my grandpa has led so far. Just like the book which was full of birthdays and holidays and vacations and silly moments that none of us remembered until we saw them again, I knew this gallery would become a fond memory. It is living proof of how much we have all grown and how much has changed, while also showing us all of the things that hadn't changed at all.
There will probably never be a perfect photograph of every important moment in our lives. Sometimes the lighting will be terrible. Sometimes someone will blink. Sometimes the photo will be slightly blurry because everyone was laughing too hard. BUT! I think those photographs can end up being some of the most meaningful ones we have.
Because years from now, we aren't going to look at those photos and think about the white balance being slightly off. We're going to look at it and remember exactly who was there, what the room felt like, and how much we loved those people.
