Water.  It’s everywhere, both around us and within us, in one form or another.  For today’s Photography 101 challenge, I’m once again relying on older pictures, but they’re two of my favorites, and they’ve been in my mind quite a bit lately.

Both photos are from one of our many camping trips last summer.  We haven’t been able to go camping this year at all, aside from the kids camping out in the yard a time or two when it was still warm.  We did, however, find some adorable camping-themed picture frames this summer on our trip up north, so Seymour asked me to get a couple of our camping pictures printed off to put in them.  Perfectly enough for this challenge, one frame was horizontal and one frame was vertical.

Lovely horizontal picture, featuring a pretty smile from Miss Tadpole. 🙂

Last summer we camped at Pine Lake several times and on our first trip, we decided that we wanted some nice family pictures by the water.  But the trouble with kids is that they seem to make the best faces when they’re not looking at the camera, and by best, I mean nicest – Miss Tadpole is the queen of funny faces, which she makes plenty of when I’m trying to take her picture.  But those don’t feature in this post.  Not really.

Of course, the trouble with family photos in general is finding a shot that everyone agrees is perfect (or at least as close to perfect as is humanly possible), so I ended up with half a dozen shots of each pose because someone always found something to nitpick in their picture.

Pretty vertical picture. 🙂

I had originally taken both of these shots horizontally in order to get the lake in the background, but when I went hunting for a vertical picture for my pretty new vertical frame, I couldn’t find one.  I decided to crop this one because I love Miss Tadpole’s sideways laughing expression.  I really wanted to use both pictures because one is a nice picture and one is funny, but I also really wanted the lake in both pictures, and I couldn’t figure out how to have my cake and eat it, too.

I prefer shooting pictures horizontally because you can get more of your subject into your frame.  Since I love shooting landscapes, horizontal is my default mode.  But for portraits (say, of my kids), I like vertical compositions better.  It’s so much more  personal, whereas horizontal composition gives you more distance from your subject, even if you are up close and personal when you take the picture.

I suppose that’s probably why vertical orientation is called portrait and horizontal orientation is called landscape.

I don’t remember what Miss Tadpole was laughing about now, but I do know that this is one of my favorite camping pictures from last summer, right up there with this one, and that we had an awful lot of fun at the lake last year.  I hope next year we’ll be able to make more waterfront memories. 🙂

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