Snapping Back to Reality

I picked up a real camera last week. Not my phone. No available filters. An actual camera with a lens I had to manually adjust, on a dock at golden hour, photographing my own kid for her senior pictures.

It had been a while.

Rori is a senior this year, which is a sentence I still can't say without a small internal gasp, and somewhere in the process of planning her shoot I realized... I used to do this. Why am I so anxious? Photography used to be mine. Before the marketing decks and the LinkedIn posts and the fifty browser tabs open at any given time, I was the girl with the camera. And while on vacation, golden hour on the pond and running around downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, I got that girl back for a couple of hours.

Sure, some technical stuff has changed, but this experience snapped me back to reality pretty quick.

Trends have shifted. Poses that used to be "the shot" have morphed. The angles I used to lean on are apparently... a choice now, not a given. I found myself scrolling references the night before, taking notes like a student instead of someone who'd done this a hundred times. Humbling? A little. But also exactly what I needed.

And then there was my actual hardest critic: Rori, standing right in front of me, possibly doubting every direction I gave her. I'd ask her to tilt her chin, walk a certain way, turn her head just so... and she'd look at me like I'd lost it, giggling. Fair… it can be awkward, even if it’s the person who birthed you giving the direction. Some trends have changed. Some haven't. And with a lot of examples I saw online doing the extremely filtered, flames-in-the-air, fully-produced thing, I'll admit... I felt a little out of my element walking in.

But then I started showing her the shots on the back of the camera. And she was pleasantly surprised. She actually thanked me. She loved how some of them turned out, and the same poses she'd questioned two minutes earlier suddenly made sense to her. She laughed about the "why" of it all right along with me. By the end, she wasn't waiting on my direction anymore, she was choosing her own poses and picking her own spots, more confident with every shot.

There's something about being rusty at a thing you used to be good at, and having to earn back the trust of your own skeptical teenager, that recalibrates you fast. I couldn't coast. I had to actually think about angles again, read the trends I'd missed, and prove it shot by shot instead of just telling her to trust me. I had to be present with it, not just competent at it.

I want to remember that part. Not the technical rust, but the reminder that skills you're passionate about don't stay sharp on autopilot. You have to keep showing up for them, even when life has quietly moved you somewhere else. I didn't stop loving photography. I just stopped practicing it. Those are different things, and this experience made that clear.

We moved through several locations that day, chasing light, chasing backdrops, chasing the version of the shot I had in my head. I expected to be emotional the whole time. I wasn't. I only choked up once, which honestly surprised me a bit. Maybe it was because I was too busy working to feel it in real time... camera up, adjusting settings, watching her face. But there was one moment, one specific frame, where it hit me all at once: this is my work and my kid, together, in the same shot. Two things I love that haven’t shared this exact space since she was little.

A cool moment I didn't plan for? My other kids got to watch me take photos of her at our Airbnb by the pond. And a few of them ended up jumping into some of the pictures too. There's something a little full-circle about your kids seeing you be good at something that has nothing to do with being their mom... and then getting pulled into it anyway.

So here's to being a beginner again at something you used to know without thinking. Here's to a golden hour, a very patient almost-graduate, a few surprise cameos from her siblings and nana, and a mom who forgot how much she missed this until she was standing there with the camera back in her hands.

I've got a few more sessions with Rori before this senior photo chapter wraps up. I'm already looking forward to the time with her and seeing how much more comes back to me... and how much I still have to learn.