Family Photo Proof Sheet

My dad emailed me the proof sheet of some of the photos he took this past weekend. He, of course, thinks they are all terrible...but despite the shadows behind my brother's head, I think the top left one could be nice to hang on the wall after a little cropping. Except that I hate the way I'm sitting in that photo (my thighs look huge) and you can tell I was having to "wrangle" Eddie to stay still in my lap.

The top right photo is pretty representative of our family: Eddie is busy concentrating on other things and my dad looks like a ghost against the dark background. (In his defense he was pretty sick that day so he wasn't really "there" fully anyway.)

Check out the bottom right photo. It is double exposed (meaning that my dad accidentally took two pictures on the same sheet of film). Eddie and I totally changed positions between the two takes...but the most striking thing is that my dad is in almost the exact same place, twice. He had to walk away from us to cock the shutter between the photos, yet he resumed the same pose, location, AND facial expression for each picture! Crazy, right? Well, not to me. There's that saying, "you can't teach an old dog new tricks..." Let's just say that applies here.

Eddie is always looking someplace other than the camera because we would quickly point to something for him to look at, or throw keys or a cell phone onto the carpet near the camera to catch his attention. My dad used an airbulb thing in his hand attached to the camera via a long tube to take the picture--so there was no person behind the camera to catch Eddie's attention for us.