One of the downfalls of being a Greenville SC Photographer is that I’m rarely in images.

I’m so busy holding a camera and chasing my kids or posing newborn clients, that I never appear behind the lens.  If I pass the camera over to my husband, I’m often unsatisfied with the result.  Not so much because of how I look in the images, but because all I see are composition flaws.  (It would have looked better from this angle.  I sure wish this part was in focus.)  This is totally not my husband’s fault 😉

Ever since assigning final projects to  my Free Beginner Photography Class, I’ve had this idea brewing.  I thought this idea would be my final project to do along with the class, but I ended up shooting a project in 3 days all about Beautiful Feet.  But this initial idea just won’t let me go.  And I will never complete it if I don’t have accountability.

So for 52 weeks (at least), I’m going to post here on Mondays with one Self Portrait of Motherhood.  I’m keeping it all black and white because that is my first love and it’ll also give the project continuity.  I’ll include a little snippet of the story behind the images so I can remember this time.

Let me warn you: I’m not going to pretty anything up.  This will be my real life lived authentically.  Raw emotion.  Crazy piles of laundry.  Kids climbing all over me.  Dinner being burnt on the stove.  Bouncing on the trampoline.  Sneaking in the bathroom for just a moment of peace.

I want this to be a record for my children of who I am and the kind of crazy we lived together.

“Worn”

We took a weekend trip to visit family in Atlanta.  My son hardly ate the whole trip.  He was exhausted and flipped out at bedtime crying, “I want MY big bed.  Go home!”  The next day I photographed my new nephew.  An unexpected trip to the ER by a family member, had us leaving later than planned.  We stopped on the way home to search for owls in a location where there were two and found none.  We did see a possum. Got home around 9pm with a car full of sleepy people.  I remember now, why we have avoided traveling with the little ones for shorter trips.  It was good, but it takes a lot out of you.