Photo February - Day One

One of my favorite bloggers, the Plastic Mancunian did something like this with music last month. A blog post a day with one of his favorite songs.

Most bloggers will tell you that blogging daily is a really hard thing to do unless you have a theme, or something to talk about, or a soapbox to batter. Or as with this case, something to talk to.

So for the 29 days of February, I'm going to be posting a photo and writing a bit about what the photo means to me.

I'm not a photograher by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a reasonably good camera (a Canon ProShot) and an eye for the quietly absurd. I tend to take photos of things, rather than people. When I do take shots of people, I prefer them to be unstaged. Like the one below.

Today's photo is of my niece, Gee, taken a few years ago when she was four. It's my favorite photo of her. (And for the record, her mother has given her permission for me to post this)

I took a heap of photos for my sister when I was over one weekend - my brother in law was turning forty and she wanted to give him some family photos - so I took a series of shots of my sister, Gee and her sister Elle.

They were happy with the results.

Gee was a very sombre baby - exeptionally quiet and very cuddly. She was the child that stood back, in a corner, and watched everything. She didn't smile that much. She never said that much, leaving her big sister to do the talking. Gee used to follow her sister around like a shadow.

Then she turned four and things changed - and this vibrant, giggly, bouncy, fearless child came out of this sturdy four-year-old body. This incredible life force. We always knew that Gee was going to be fiercely intelligent  - which she's proving now at school, but she's a good person too - like her sister.

This photo, captured mid-giggle, seems to capture all of this.