To wrap up this week's focus on upcoming vacation photography, I'd like to address an issue that comes up regularly: the family quickly gets bored with you stopping to take pictures and taking so long at each stop. You feel compelled to not use a tripod, not bother to move around to find the right angle, and basically start rushing your photos. So what do you do?
Two things:
- Make time. If photography is important to you and you're on a vacation where you want to spend some time working on your photo skills, then you simply have to carve out time to do that. Get up early and take dawn and sunrise photos before the family gets in gear. Plan to be back at the hotel by a certain time and have a period where you can do your thing until dinner (e.g. sunset photography). Obviously, this sort of thing requires spousal buy-in, which means you may need to grant them time of their own away from the family, too. Frankly, I think that makes the best vacations, anyway, because mom and dad both come back to the full family groupings with stories about what they did and saw, and this helps everyone see the place a little differently than if you all do everything together.
- Make it fun. Okay, classic problem: you get to a geyser basin in Yellowstone, the family dismounts the mobile home (RV), and everyone walks the boardwalk path from beginning to end, gulping it all in like fast food. Every time you stop to try to take a picture, you find the rest of the family has moved on ahead and is complaining "Come on, dad" (or mom). Well, you've got something to do: take photos. Your family doesn't: all they have to do is walk through the exhibit, and today's Sesame Street/MTV/Ad-driven 15-second attention spans mean that everyone barely stops. Solution? Give them something to do! Hand them each a simple camera and challenge them to take a better photo than you. Or a photo of something you didn't see. The possibilities are actually endless here. But if you just let the family walk through without an assignment of some sort, I'll guarantee that you'll be the laggard and get the grief for that. In most families, the other spouse is usually happy to help because anything that makes learning fun is promoting childhood growth, and any parent ought to support that.
Both these things require you to begin the vacation with a plan. It's difficult to do either of them if you haven't figured out how you're going to do them prior to the vacation starting. What I see in most vacation questions is that people are spending a lot of time planning the where and when, but not the what and why. Frankly, the where and when are easy. I've got a bucket list that fills a file cabinet and all the answers to that are in there. It's the "what" that consumes my thinking. Lately I've been working on an Africa project, which is why I'm ending up over there each summer. The "where" is easy, it's dealing with the "what" that consumes my thinking.
So think a little more about who's doing what on your vacation, and how. Example: dad gets up early most mornings and the family gets up late. That gives him some photography time alone in nice light. Dad manages the kids during the day but occupies them with targeted (and fun!) learning experiences as you wander about sightseeing. Mom gets as least one break during the day to chill or do something on her own. Back to the hotel or RV park early enough so that Dad has a bit more photography time before dinner. Family night reviewing all that happened during the day. If mom's the photographer, switch the roles.
Time to crowd source. So, the question is this: what are those targeted and fun learning experiences? Let's see if we can help each other out here. Send me your best ideas and I'll see if I can package them together into a giant suggestion article.
Those of you already on vacation? Well, there's always next year...