Picture perfect: more people hire professional photographers to capture ordinary moments

You can already do it at Disney World; why not in your own backyard for a birthday?  Reality TV has evidently accustomed us to spending our lives being followed by someone with a camera—and now you can pay for a professional to do just that.

From the New York Daily News: 

When Anzalee and Kristain Rhodes look back at their daughter’s first year of life, they won’t be examining blurry, red-eyed camera phone photos. They’ll have crisp, finely detailed professional shots of a baby growing up before their eyes.

Each month, a team of professional photographers shoots them as they go about their daily lives at home and around New York City.

“As a baby, she changes every month. There’s something new. Her hair changes, everything changes within a month and we wanted to be able to capture all those things,” said Anzalee Rhodes, a 35-year-old statistician who lives on Long Island, New York

The Rhodes are part of a trend of folks hiring professional photographers to document not just big events like weddings and bar mitzvahs, but everyday activities. Sometimes they want a milestone recorded — a child’s birthday party or family get-together. But often they’re hiring pros to photograph things they might otherwise have shot with their own cellphones or point-and-shoot cameras: a weekend outing, a vacation, or a portrait of a beloved pet.

Those photos are then shared, just like their own cell pictures would be, on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

“We’re in a digital-media focused world now. I mean, you kind of live your life through Facebook, looking at photos of peoples’ lives. There’s a lot more sharing in general, so that is expanding the footprint of what people will consider to have professionally documented,” said Tim Beckford, a photographer known as Tim Co. with I Heart New York, the New York City-based company that shoots the Rhodes family each month.

Read more. 

It’s all weird and a little bit unnatural, I think, and it turns ordinary life into one more moment for social media. We have become little more than subjects for the camera, props to be posed. More troubling, though, is that this seems to eradicate a fundamental fact of life: sometimes in life there are blurred edges, unbalanced colors and moments that are off-center and underdeveloped. You don’t get that with perfect shots.

You get something else.

But I don’t think it’s life.