5 Tips for Documenting your Family during Covid-19

If you haven’t noticed, the ‘Front Porch’ sessions happening is a bit of a hot button for me.

Why?

Because photography is a non-essential business, and ‘Front Porch’ sessions are not documenting your time in quarantine. They are not photojournalism. They are staged sessions.

True documentary photography is not staged at all. It’s messy, beautiful, and tells a story without words. A portrait session where everyone is smiling at the camera does none of that, hence does not fit the definition of photojournalism and documentary photography.

So how do you document your family during Covid-19?

Here are a few tips on how to document your family to have the good, the bad, and the messy fun memories during your time at home.

1. Use whatever camera you have available. All you have is a point and shoot, great! Phone camera available, use it!

2. Have school age kids? Photograph them working on their online school work. Shoot them doing science experiments, art project, and cooking. This is the kind of stuff you and your kids will remember.

3. Working from home? Shoot it, whether it’s you, your significant other or someone else in your house working. You’ll want to remember where you worked, how you worked with your kids around. How you worse headphones all day to listened to Zoom meetings.

4. Don’t clean up your house for photos. Show people how messy my house is? What?!
   Yes because it’s real! Everyone has stuff on their counter tops. We all have random messes. Cups not put away. A shoe left out. That’s real, and I want you to photograph real daily life.

5. Take a few pictures everyday.
   I’ve been pulling out my camera and shooting a few shots everyday. Some are good (some are not).

6. Don’t worry about having the perfect shot! Life is not perfect, so your photos don’t have to be.

And when you and I are finally able to go out, eat at our favorite restaurants, get together with our friends and neighbors, we’ll have all of these great photographs to look back on about our time being at home with our families during a pandemic.

And just to show everyone I’ve been photographing my own family, here are a few of my family.