Anybody else find that when your kids get their hands on your camera the pictures they take are better and more creative than yours? It makes fee feel both proud and inadequate ;)
I had a similar experience once, years ago, when a friend's daughter asked to take a couple shots with my then-new Minolta A200. She snapped off about two or three shots and when I went through the cards later (this was at the end of a long day of event photography), I realized she probably would have been a better choice of photographer for the even than me....
As much fun as that camera was, I never could get an acceptably sharp photo with it, but this 8 year old shooting automatic managed to get tack-sharp shots..
Well you know what they say: the youngest baby is the oldest human being on earth. So it makes sense.
From a totally different angle (literally), I found the height of people affects what they see a lot. My wife and daughter are all photographers (I used to joke that when we take photos there's no one in front of the camera) and I found that our different heights radically affects how we see a scene.
Many a times we were standing on the same spot and looking at the same scene, they would tell me to take a beautiful scene and I couldn't see anything special, but when I gave them the camera and let them take it, I saw a beautiful picture.
They can't be too young though; once a 5 year old showed great interest in my Minilux. So I gave it to him and showed him how to handle it, but he couldn't even put the view finder to his eye.
My son, when about four years old, took a lovely portrait of my parents standing close together in a bush setting. If I had taken the photo I would have gone in closer, but the wide photo he had taken emphasised their closeness in a greater surround. It also reminded me how less intimidating a child with a camera is to their subject, unlike an old bloke like myself.
In fact, I have had a lifetime of people viewing my latest roll of prints with close to indifference, then suddenly exclaiming - "THIS ONE IS GREAT, - ...and your in it Dave." To which I had to explain that was the ONE photo on the roll where I handed the camera to someone else. (Not always a kid).
It's the wife with me. Her shots with the cheap little Sony digacam are so much better than mine with my DSLR or extensive collection of film cameras that include my new (to me) M4-2.
