Title • Photo Friday: Childhood

Over the last few years I’ve taken several thousand pictures of our children but wanted to take a new one for this week’s Photo Friday challenge. But none of my attempts over the last few days have been remotely suitable, not least I think because they have totally failed to capture anything even vaguely evocative of childhood. Or, put another way; while posing for photographs is inevitably something that happens when you’re a child, the resultant images often appear artificial and stilted and (in my experience) mostly fail to capture what I see as the defining characteristics of childhood – things like spontaneity, lack of self-consciousness, and the joyfullness at just being alive ... none of which can be faked or posed. at least not convincingly.

So, after rummaging through various albums, this is the one I decided on. It was taken around 18 months ago at Castle Hill, Huddersfield, and captures two of our daughters – just playing. It was taken with my old camera, a Fujifilm FinePix 40i, so isn’t quite up to the technical standard of some of my recent images, but I do think that it works well for this week’s challenge.

And finally, while I'd like to be able to say that my cropping of our daughter (on the left of this image) was intentional – to better represent the movement and vitality of the moment – it was actually a consequence of the shutter lag of the camera used for the picture. But, intentional or otherwise, I think it works reasonably well in this context ;-)