Here’s a double bonus for all you moms! Not only is this post about photography tips, but it also comes with a hands-on project for making a Mid-Winter Tree! But before I get to the project, here’s the photography part. It’s all about point of view!

I first fell in love with the idea of point of view when I was writing. I’d do warm up writing exercises by taking a particular scenario and how a character would respond. Then I’d write the same story from a different character’s point of view and then from a third character and so on.

With a camera, I find myself having a blast with point of view in how Brian and I move around our subjects. This is especially great with your kids when they’re busy doing a project. Let them focus on the project while you move around them taking different shots from different angles, aka points of view!

This is my barefoot-tutu princess with Superman. After a few of these shots I moved around to the front and shot down on the kids by standing on a chair.

I love shooting down on little ones because it emphasizes that much more their age and precious size.

Blaze tried this craft for about two minutes, and then he decided it was way more fun to eat the peanut butter. So I came off the chair and shot up at him.

And like all projects go with little ones under five, they weren’t interested after ten minutes (two for Blaze), so guess who ended up finishing the Mid-Winter Tree?

Any moms relate?

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Exercise for “Point of View” while making a Mid-Winter Tree (project from our Waldorf school!)

1. Be prepared for a mess!

2. Instead of throwing out your Christmas tree right away, set it in a pot outside and make a mid-winter feast tree for your birds and squirrels. All you need is pine cones, string, lots of peanut butter, birdseed, pumpkin seeds, and apples or oranges.

3. Give each child their own bowl of peanut butter and let them roll their pine cones through it, stuffing the peanut butter in every little pine cone nook. Then sprinkle bird seed or pumpkin seeds over the top. (It’s a great project for pre-school age because they can just get messy or like Blaze, opt to eat the peanut butter. )

4. After you have a few peanut butter pine cones, start stringing them up on your tree (we used our little Christmas tree that was in the play room, but any tree would do).

5. Then slice up your apples and oranges and string those too! If you’re really going for it, you can always string popcorn, but I hear cranberries aren’t really tasty to little animals.

6. And don’t forget to shoot some shots those first five minutes of the project. Work on your point of view. Get up on a chair, move down to the floor, shoot straight on, keep mixing it up without the kids having to move for you.

7. Lighting tip, if you’re photos are to dark you may want to bump up your ISO to 800 or 1600. For these above images, my ISO had to be at 800, and I opened up to a 2.8 to 3.2 f-stop. The higher ISO makes them a bit grainy, but I don’t mind it for what I was trying to capture. Have fun!!

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