Having none of my own, however, puts me at a disadvantage from time to time.

I’ve started doing some work with the Plymouth Neighborhood Foundation, a great group that works on a number of fronts within the broad category of creating low income housing opportunities. Last week I visited two of the properties they manage to take a couple portraits, one of which was a family portrait: a Somali woman, her 18 month old son, and her 5 month old daughter.

Hawa and her kids

Rapport with my subject is absolutely the most important thing in my portrait work. If there’s no trust or element of connection between me and the people I’m shooting, the photos end up bland and uninspired, no matter how interesting the composition or how intricate the lighting. But also, that connection is why I’m a photographer. How many jobs are there where you can just enter the home of complete strangers and get a glimpse of their life? This kind of shoot is exactly why I love my job.

But back to rapport. When there are kids in a shoot, they are the wellspring of all rapport: if you get them on your side, the adults will be with you. If you lose them, the adults will be spending all their energy getting the kids in the game and none of their energy making some kind of connection with the camera. So we walk in to the apartment, and the son, Aris, has this look like, Who are you and why are you in my house? So I get to work. I make eye contact, get the smiles going. As I start opening my light cases and camera bag I make faces to him that say, Ooh, what’s this great stuff? You wanna look? And that’s when the control slips from my hands, about 48 seconds in to the shoot.

Turns out that Aris is at the exact age where everything he does is a search for the edges – is standing on the couch going to get him yelled at? How about pulling his sister’s hair? (Not that these things happened; they’re just examples.) If you’ve ever been around toddlers you know the button pushing I’m talking about. So as soon as I open my light case, I’ve way oversold how interested Aris needs to be about what’s going on; he’s very quickly all over everything, pulling out cords, trying to actually *jump* on my camera bag, wanting to open everything.

As I’m putting these very breakable and expensive electronic lights up on light stands around the room, I realize the scope of the tactical error I’ve made. Aris is totally sold on how fun this stuff is, and what would be really fun would be to yank it all down and see what happens when it hits the floor. So he’s toddling from light to light, making like he’s preparing to pull. Luckily, part of what he’s doing is testing Hawa, so as he does these things he looks over at her and at me as owner of these great toys, to gauge our reactions. We have time to lunge over and stop him before he does any damage.

Meanwhile, between lungings, I’m metering the light, composing the shot, trying to get a word with Hawa. It’s kind of lunacy, but the shot comes together and it’s time to get the family sitting on the couch together. So Hawa drags Aris away from the lights and onto the couch and I get a couple shots before Aris squirms away. I play goalie and protect the gear. Hawa re-apprehends Aris. We get a couple more shots.

And so on.

Luckily, Hawa’s daughter was just stoic. I can’t remember her name, which is fairly fitting: you always remember the troublemaker more than the good kid (spoken by a classic good first child). I was able to get 15 or so shots before our demands to stay on the couch transformed Aris’ fun into definitely not fun, rendering him pretty much unphotogenic for the purposes of a photo shoot meant to show happy apartment residents. We called it a wrap, and I have never packed gear so quickly.

More work at chrisbohnhoff.com.