Berlin & Balance

Something I still really struggle with is being able to balance photographing our family outings and staying present at the same time. I tend to go from one extreme to the other, only occasionally stopping somewhere in the middle. As a storytelling photographer, it’s hard for me to not try to shoot full stories, even if they’re just for me. If I know I didn’t get a key detail or a strong beginning or ending, I have a hard time looking a my photos from a day out as anything other than a group of individual shots and it bugs me. Knowing this about myself, I tend to either leave my camera at home or spend the majority of a day out looking for those shots that will make our day a story, a great story for us to be able to look back at but not one that I fully participated in.

When we went to Berlin, I brought my trusty Fuji along and had only hoped to get my daily 365 images and some pictures of my son with our friends visiting from Tacoma. It’s the closest I’ve come to finding balance with shooting our adventures and actually living them in a long time. There are no full stories here. There are key pieces of information missing. I’m not in the pictures nearly enough. But I love that I have these photos and I love how it felt to be able to stay in the moment and not worry about not getting a particular shot. I debated blogging these images since they are only parts of an incomplete story, but I still love them. Our trip was amazing and fulfilling and I don’t regret how I approached photographing it one bit.

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