The Eyler Family

I would like to say family photos are fun to do.  So many personalities and you get to see them interact with each other, pick on each other, it’s always a good time. What makes it better for me is getting to travel back home to snap some portraits with some fellow Alumni from good ole Petersburg!  It seems more and more these days, I’m too busy to make my own trip home so I like it when my work is my excuse to go home for a little bit.  Chris and her family cashed in a gift certificate giving her a waiver on the sitting fee,  sometimes that’s enough of a reason to get the family together and update the pictures on the wall.   I’ve never been a fan of photo studios at the local Sears.  Seems so impersonal and you just sit…and wait…. and then go in, almost like a doctor’s visit with the whole family.  What if you wait 30min?? or 45min?? Will the kids be on their best behavior after sitting for that long?  It’s a gamble, and after you get in,  it’s a matter of the youngest and whether he or she will cooperate!  So, in many ways,  taking it outside in a comfortable setting where you don’t have a line-up of people,  you can enjoy the time together and capture a more natural setting for the family and how they are with each other, instead of being a 3:30pm appointment.

Even so,  if you have some young kids in the mix and they are just NOT in the mood… then the all important “family group shot” becomes a little more difficult.  It turns into this  strategy game or battle of the wits.  On one side you have the parents and photographer and on the other…. the child.  Sometimes we adults win, and sometimes, the kid wins… and as the shoot progresses, I am able to  capture many moments that you may not get while waiting in a hallway at Sears.  It’s hard for the parent to gauge how well the photo shoot actually went because all they can remember is trying to get the kids to cooperate, so you always get asked “do you have any good ones? or did you get it?”  What they don’t know is I’m capturing those tiny moments in between too, the ones that get overlooked because they are too busy worrying about that one shot.   When the family finally sees their photos, many will ask “when did you get that?”  So it’s a nice surprise for them and more rewarding for me as the photographer and my final product.

I remember our small family get-togethers as a kid,  “the holiday family members” I would call them, but still we enjoyed the time we were together, then we’d part ways for the year knowing that over the next calendar year, we’d see each other at a wedding or another holiday.   This large group of 100+ was a lot of fun,  dancing, singing, laughing and the kids loved the camera.  Some were shy at first but eventually warmed up to me and I couldn’t help but leave there with a smile on my face thinking “when are we going to have our family reunion?”   LINK TO WEBPAGE WITH PHOTOS

Anyway,  if you think you have self-image problems,  take a test…. HERE IS A TEST.

        I chose to take the girls to a water park this year.  It wasn’t going to be a 7 day Disney trip by any means, but I thought it would be fun to do something new.  I’ve never been to a water park and it just so happens we live about an hour from the BIGGEST one in the country!  Kalahari is mammoth and it was not too bad on the wallet…. well, not on the front side of this trip anyway!  I made my reservations which the rooms are priced out for 4 people, so I grabbed my nephew to go.  He would serve as a nice buffer between me and my kids in case…. well,  HE WAS A GOOD BUFFER!   When you pull up to this place, being that it’s the size of 3 football fields, you can’t help but be impressed by it’s size.  The staff greeting you did an awesome job, of making us feel GREETED, they were throwing all sorts of smiles and excitement at us.  We couldn’t get to our rooms yet because they were not ready but they let us register and get our park passes and away we went….. 

        It was 100% filled the first night we were there,  it was all sorts of jammed up,  hour long waits for rides,  whistles chirping right and left,  tons of big pastie people walking up and down the paths trying not to fall or slip while getting to the next ride.  I bet the place is much different in July with the outside open,  but the girls had a blast and couldn’t get enough of it.  I myself found it exhausting and had enough of it, which is where the BUFFER kicked in. “Justin, take them over there!”  “Justin, take them on that ride, go to the wave pool, go get my camera, go go go go.”  Yeah, it worked out nicely and I got some funny pics of him to boot.  They cleverly put the huge arcade right by the park so when you went to the park, you had to walk through it.  and you don’t have to buy tokens, NO, they are genius, they give you a pre-loaded card so when you want to play a game, you just swipe like a credit card!  DAMN THEM!  $20.00 here, $20.00 there.  I got a laffy taffy out of my spending, and I had to convince the girls out of those 200 tickets for that!! GEEZ!  I think we might try a day or two next year in the summer, just to experience it with the outside as well.  It’s a great place and I give it two thumbs up, but two thumbs down on everything pastie!! but it’s november and we are in Ohio… Maybe in July it looks like Miami there.