Relationships...

Thinking about relationships, twins imediatley came to mind. I find the relationships between siblings fascinating and twins even more so. It is only 15 months between me and my sister and even though we are very close it is also a very complicated one. I managed to find two five year olds: Holly and Rosie and their older sister Ellie. I was able to photograph them after lots of rescheduling due to one of them being sick and later I lost my voice due to cold and flu. But on Saturday morning I had a few hours with them. Thinking about it, I have never really photographed kids to any extent, luckily they were very willing to welcome me in to their lives, this also included me taking part in all their activities.

It was hard to get the twins both in the same frame or directly interacting, it was as if they did not want to be compared, often I noticed that it was always on of them playing with or sitting next to their older sister Ellie. The slightly older twin, Holly was often determined to pose infront of the camera when the other two were playing in the back of the frame, a lot less aware, I found it all really fascinating but was to focused on talking pictures to be able to make any sense of what was going on until later. When I photographed her sisters I could feel Holly pulling at me for attention, I think my presence there my also have changed the way they interacted. After taking the camera of me several times to take pictures of me and each other, they found some of their parent's cameras and started to click away, so we all ended up taking pictures. It was a lot of running around and I didn't have control over my exposures all the time and have got some classic burn outs for digital infront of a very bright window as well focus on the wrong things. All in all I think the shoot went quite well but I would have liked to capture more of the tension between the twins but I really need to spend more time to get such moments.
I had also hoped to photograph two 18 year old twins that I found through asking lots of people, they looked really good, very punky and specific way of dressing. They agreed to pictures but later changed their mind. I think I might have freaked them out a bit by saying a could come and do some pictures when they were hanging out with their friends in Camden.... I also tried a housing project for teenage mums in my area but soon realised that I would need more time to get access, the social worker was really nice but said that understandably these girls are very vulnerable and it would take me along time gain their trust.
Instead I decided to settle for a more straight forward mother & baby relationship. I found Ania and her baby Ruby and they readily agreed to pictures. I find myself often shooting with the lens right open and on as slow shutterspeed as I can get away with and often getting things out of focus or blurred by movement. I'm not used to working on these settings and it is really intersting to see the results, quite often the shallow depth of field and most of the frame out of foccus creates more feeling in the image.
I am going to photograph a group of bridge players tomorrow and are just hoping that the continous cough I have draged around for days will miraciously dissapear!