Welcome to another installment of the “But Brooke…” series, where we call out all the elephants in the room about why you’re not hiring a photographer this minute cause you and I both know your life is BIG and your tiny moments matter but something–or a smattering of somethings–is keeping you from pulling the trigger.
Here’s the big one I hear a LOT. The husbands. Cute, wonderful, smart awesome funny hardworking husbands who would rather be doing anything, annnnyyyythiiingngg in the world than taking family photos. They’d rather be scraping their eyeballs out with a baby spoon, or standing in line at the DMV or mopping the floor with a toothbrush or any number of things that make me want to quite literally cry. That’s how torturous this thing is for dads.
And the confession is that I am married to one such dad.
One who blessedly does not complain even though he loves family photos about as much as I love taxes but we have been photographed by a lot of photographers and–his experiences have varied widely.
So why would the same dad who has the same distaste for family pics be crawling out of his skin during one experience and then completely relaxed (and dare I say it) having fun with another photographer?
All photographers are not created equal in their treatment of dads. Some ignore em. Some coddle em. A lot complain about em.
So I got to thinking. Do dads hate their families? Do they hate loving on their wives and playing with their kids? Acourse not. So why do they hate photos? YES I will say it–the nature of a photo session is sometimes the culprit. you know. stressball wife who wants everything to be perfect and the house and kids spotless and we must permasmile during this whole charade but actually our eyeballs are bugging outta our heads and when can it STOP for the love.
Beyond prep stress (which I’m gonna address in another post–man I have a lot to say about all this apparently) I promise no forced permasmiles. But it’s not even about that. Let’s get into the real heart of the issue.
There are a couple of things us photographers tend to do that are a tiny bit irksome to dudes. And lemme tell you I’ve had a lot of practice on one such dude and if you have a man in your fam who is dreading the experience because he’s had some less-than-sparkly experiences in the past, I wanna say I’ve been there. And after trying to coax love out of my super-loving man (and oodles of other super-loving but less-photo-loving men) for photos, I know what works and what doesn’t.
The good news: you get to benefit from all my knowledge and (slightly weird?) analyzing of how dads roll during photos. The bad news: if your photographer kinda has no idea how to jam with this, you’re rolling the dice on whether you’ll get happy connected loving photos of your guy to remember for always or gritted-teeth-I-hate-this pics to die a slow death on your computer cause ain’ nobody want that on their walls.
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Here’s the part where I tell you I’d really love to photograph your family whether your man is gushy or not and here’s where you can see more family photos to see if this is the way you want to remember your family. If you think it just might be, let’s chat about your family session. (full pricing + scheduling deets to you lickety split!)
