What a Difference a Year Makes
Friday, January 31st, 2014From Friday Mom – Erin:
We had professional family photographs taken last week to capture Rory at the one year mark. Even though mommy’s iPhone is chock full of snapshots of the little guy, we wanted to be sure we had some nice pictures to look back at when he gets older. The photographer who shot his newborn pictures was unavailable, so I researched and located a reasonably priced photographer in our area who specializes in newborns and families.
Despite switching photographers, the juxtaposition between last year’s images and this year’s images is remarkable. Some of these differences are to be expected: he is taller, heavier, and older; he is more attentive to the world around him; and he is more active and more present in every moment captured with the open-close-open of the shutter.
Yet, in other subtle ways the photos are still very much the same. For example, because our house is so small, our new photographer did not have a lot of space to select from when selecting poses, camera angles, and backgrounds. That is not to say that the photos are identical; rather, there are certain similarities in composition.
Taken side-by-side, the photographs, together, reflect with eerie perfection the subtle yet enormous differences of a year’s time in the life of a child. Whereas Rory’s newborn photos capture the timidity of two parents fearful that they might “break the baby” and the awkward, yet loving care of a family of three still very much in the process of getting to know their latest addition, Rory’s one-year photos capture the excitement of three personalities united by the unbreakable love parents and children share for one another. The eyes that stared with somewhat empty newness last year are lit brightly with energy and spunk in this year’s shots. The timid, gentle, and uncertain embrace of last year’s images are replaced by warm, tight squeezes around a wiggly, wrangling toddler. And the visible silence of a soundly sleeping baby is drowned out by the visible laughter of Rory’s gleaming smile.
What a difference, indeed.