Photo Walk

A very wise man and former Kodak colleague, Bob LaPerle, convinced me of the value of putting cameras into kids' hands and letting them express their vision. Bob isn't the only person to believe this. Wendy Ewald wrote about the concept in I Wanna Take Me a Picture.

Now that you can get a decent digital camera for under $50 on eBay, both of my kids, aged nearly 5 and 6 1/2, have their own cameras and are making known their own visions of the world.

We've started taking "photo walks," little excursions around the neighborhood where the kids can shoot photos and Mom can too. I'm impressed by how much they shoot and how uninhibited they are (especially versus . . . um . . . me). They will stroll up to a house to catch a detail or crawl through a bush to get close to their desired object. Both kids are deeply attracted to color. Neither shies away from cropping close with the camera. I've always considered myself a decent photographer but my little ones sometimes blow me away with what and how they see.

A sample of Graham's handiwork is shown above.

Now if I can just keep up with the flow of images to the computer . . . .