Documenting Your Daily Life with Fine Art Flair

Hey guys!  My name is Sarah and I’m a Hello Artist here at Hello Storyteller.  I live in Alberta, Canada with my husband and 5 kids on a small acreage.  I’m going to share my journey of discovery and some tips to find success in 365 Day Photo Projects. It is possible to photograph your everyday moments when documentary style just isn’t your thing. Here are some tips on documenting your daily life with fine art flair!

So, first of all, I am not a documentary photographer.  I love documentary photographs, but I am not a great “go with the flow” kind of person or photographer.  My preference is for a schedule or a plan.  I like a detailed to-do list that I can check off at periodic intervals.  I like a tidy house (though I often do not get that wish with 5 kids).  When I’m taking pictures of my kids, I like coordinated outfits, colours that coincide with principles of colour theory, and…. brushed hair.  I can’t help it.  That’s what fills my heart.  With five little kids, it is very rare that we have any of these things without careful planning. It takes lots of time, and the occasional bribery.

I love to peruse Instagram and I get so inspired to pick up my camera and shoot from the hip to capture some of our own daily occurrences.  I always commit to 365 projects because I’m sentimental and I love to have a purpose-driven project.  And there is just SO MUCH PURPOSE in a documentary 365 Day Photo Project. But, I often find myself falling flat when my goal and desire is to document our days by simply letting the moments come and taking a picture every day.  How about you?

I am slow on the camera-draw, I always miss the best moments.  I am clumsy and fumbly trying to get my gear and change my settings. By the time I do those things, the moment is almost always past (how do kids know exactly when to STOP being adorable in beautiful light??).  And the urge to tidy the scene, alter the lighting, or brush some darned hair almost always feels like a necessity and makes me even slower.  The hardest part is, if I manage to resist all those urges to make little changes here and there, and take an actual documentary photo, I rarely feel satisfied with my work.

I found myself really frustrated for a long time.  I couldn’t help but feel that documenting our daily lives wasn’t going to happen for me.   Even though I was shooting photos that were AUTHENTIC, GENUINE, and TRUE to a specific moment in time, they weren’t authentic, genuine, or true to who I am and how our family operates.  And, if I can be frank, they were NOT good.

One evening, I was taking photos of my baby right before bed.  I had my strobe set up and she was dressed in a fluffy little white thing because I was doing some portfolio work beforehand.  We were just playing.  She kept running towards me so I started throwing a stuffed bear away from me and she would toddle over to get it and then back to me with a big smile (ok, it was a glorified game of fetch, but it got her far enough from my body that I could focus on her properly). 

She stopped at one point to pick up Gundy the Bear and turned to face me and gave me the cheekiest little look and I “clicked.”  In that brief little moment, I took an image that I ended up loving, but also, at the same time as I clicked that photo, a measure of understanding that I hadn’t yet grasped clicked in my head and heart.

At that moment, it became clear to me that my 365 project was mine.  My style of photography was mine.  And even if I’m not a documentary kind of person, I could still document my family in my 365 Day Project.  And I could do it in a way that is true to who I am and who we are as a family.  The moments I capture of my babies are authentic and natural and genuine, even if the light, hair, outfits, and styling isn’t always naturally occurring.  I could inject some fine art features into my 365  Day Project if I wanted to.

After some list-making, schedule-building, and careful planning, I am finding a lot of fulfillment in documenting my daily life with a little fine art flair and fun.  To me, it is as genuine and real as a true documentary style because it is authentic to who we are, if not to the moment.  But it definitely can be a little bit more complicated.  So, I’m going to share some ideas on documenting your daily life with fine art flair in case you find yourself creatively stuck and faltering in your daily project like I was.

Want to infuse that fine art feel into your work? Check out our course, The Art of Storytelling!

Be Honest.
This is my grand epiphany here; maybe it’s yours too.  Be honest with yourself about who you are and what really speaks to your soul.  If your passion is observing, and freezing moments untouched in time, then by all means, do that.  If your 365 Day Project is full of moments where you can’t help but meddle, or like me, you keep failing to continuously pick up your camera because it’s just not satisfying or fun, maybe another approach could open up doors of opportunity and joy for you too.

Want to start a 365 Project with year long support and inspiration? Check out our 365 Project: A Year in the Life course!

Make a List.
Once you’ve decided that you’d like to infuse a little fine art into your everyday images, I recommend you start by making a list of all the little details of your daily life right now that you want to record and remember.  For me, this is probably the most pertinent part of making sure I stay on topic of documenting for my family.  This list can be filled with the littlest things.   But having my list and referring to it often helps me focus on providing opportunities where I can cultivate and create opportunities for these moments to occur naturally in the environment I want.  This list provides the inspiration for most of the images I create.

Here is a snippet of my current list:

• The dimples of my middle daughter
• My eldest being a little mama to my baby
• Dear daughter playing with her baby dolls that she loves
• The baby demanding peekaboo and “This Little Piggy”
• Big Sunday morning breakfasts
• My mom’s hands
• The children “helping” my husband
• My husband holding the kids
• The baby finding her belly button
• My eldest son tinkering with…. Everything and anything

And on and on and on….

When I’m not sure what to photograph for the day, I pick something off the list and plan a simple or sometimes, a crazy and elaborate way to capture it.

Want to learn more about getting organized as a creative? Check out our course, Finding Balance!

Plan and Prepare.
I like to plan and prepare how to capture the occurrence I’d like to work on that day.  This usually takes a couple of minutes.  I brainstorm the story I want to tell, the detail I want to remember, the little habit I want to document.  I think up props, colours, and clothes I can use to tell this story.  Then, I think about how I can light this particular moment, story or detail.  Sometimes, this means I grab three things, brush some hair and away we go.  Sometimes, it means I paint furniture, construct a million poppies, clear a room, or run to the store for berries.  

As I plan a mini photoshoot, my subjects and I start to feel excited and the creative juices start to roll.  Involving my kids in the planning and prep work helps because they almost always want to participate cooperatively in a joint project.  I was prepping for a Wizard of Oz themed shoot for my Storybook Project the other day, and I had both my boys at the table with me making a zillion tissue paper poppies.  They loved it!

Colour and Clothes.
Probably my favourite tenant of fine art photography is colour theory.  Applying principles of colour theory to my everyday images purposefully creates a beautiful vignette that really stands out.  This is probably the simplest and easiest way to incorporate some fine art into your daily photography. 

I work mostly with contrasting colour palettes or monochrome palettes because I love how the rich tones pop against each other or how my subject can pop from a single colour.  As part of planning locations, light, props, and stories, I consciously think about clothes and my colour applications.  I try to pair red and green together, blue and orange (or brown), and purple and yellow in outfits, elements in the scene (like trees or grass) and props.

Want to learn more about infusing colour into your work? Check out our course, Mastering Mood!

I don’t have a million dollars to spend on my children’s photoshoot wardrobe (boo!). With five kids, I need a lot of clothes.  I honestly prefer rich earthy tones and simple styles for their clothes anyways.  Their wardrobes are filled with clothes that I would be happy with them wearing in pictures. This includes lots of brown, tan, neutral, beige, red, mustard, dark green, navy blue, rust, and maroon. 

Things sneak in here and there (don’t get me started on the neon rainbow light up shoes that dad bought last summer or the Pink Paw Patrol snow boots the previous winter). But for the most part, I buy my kids clothes that are simple, neutral and earth toned. I do this for their everyday wear as well as for special heirloom pieces.  If he has easily accessible, comfortable “picture clothes”, even my reluctant 7 year old son is excited to get in on the photos. This way he doesn’t have to get changed for pictures, which is the worst part for him.

Light.
Another simple way to add some fine art flair to your 365 Project is to be deliberate in your use of light.  The best part of stepping away from trying to be completely documentary for me is that I get to turn off the overhead lights (and brush hair).  As I have embraced a fine art approach to my 365 Day Photo Project, I have really started to love my OCF.  I use a big strobe with a PLM umbrella system because that’s what I have (extra from the studio).  It is huge and cumbersome and leaves scratch marks all over the wall when I try to move it room to room…. but I love it.  The soft light it produces is unparalleled. 

To get good directional light I set up my strobe at a 90-45 degree angle to my subject. If I’m indoors, I’ll set it up next to a window.  If I’m shooting outside, I try and head out around golden hour (the winter is more forgiving).  You don’t need a fancy strobe to get directional light though.  Windows, or golden hour, among other things (like small inexpensive flash units), are wonderful and I use them at least half of the time.

Want to learn more about LIGHT?! Check out our Natural Light for Storytellers course!

Natural Interactions.
Lastly, there are a couple of things I do to get my kids to participate.  The worst thing is to spend so much time planning a setting up for an idea only to have an uncooperative kid blow the entire plan to pieces.  For my baby and toddler, I use a lot of food and games to get them to do what I want them to do, where I want them to do it.   

Sometimes, what I really want from my baby, Nora, is just to stay where I put her.  Food definitely helps with this.  For bigger kids, I try to give really clear parameters. Doing this before we start gives them my expectations of what I want them to do.  Sometimes I even give them physical cues as part of the set.  This is especially helpful if I’m trying to get a picture of lots of them at a given time.  I will set a prop to the left and right and tell my big kid bookends to stay within the props.  This tends to help when things get a little crazy. 

After giving all the parameters I can, I just let things unfold naturally and see what happens.  When I am quiet and stop hollering instructions, that’s when the magic happens (maybe that’s a life-lesson for me??). My kids start to engage in the moment.  There are way less rules than usual when Mom is taking pictures. So I think it’s really fun opportunity we have created together for them to be themselves and play naturally.

So to summarize, documenting your daily life with fine art flair can be done. I make sure and have a clear vision of the story I want to tell. Have a plan of how to bring that vision to life. Have clothes and props that accentuate colour theory principles. Use purposeful directional light. And it doesn’t hurt to have some tricks in my back pocket to warrant cooperation.  This might sound like a lot. But to me, it is manageable. It’s better than having an approach to a 365 Day Project that doesn’t work for who I am.  The creative planning actually fills me up and adds a little fun and craziness to our days.

For more inspiration from Sarah, follow her on Instagram!