Amanda van Scoyoc

I didn’t schedule any photo shoots for Friday and Saturday and I truly enjoyed my first weekend off in quite some time. Eli and I were planning on going to Maine but were scared off by traffic and full campsites. Instead we made the best of a beautiful weekend and walked all over Boston exploring areas that we had not explored before.

Today I visited a couple of young mothers at home. I was excited to go see Mercy and her baby, Amiliana. I had never been to her house before or met Amiliana. I love the feeling of following directions to an address and ending up at an apartment not knowing what the photo shoot will be like until I’m let inside. The photo shoot was a little difficult at first because the baby was tired and a bit fussy and the Hasselblad is not an easy camera to focus on a crawling baby.

Mercy asked me if I enjoyed taking photographs and I said “sure,” as I struggled with the focusing. After about a half hour of all of us struggling to take a set of photos, the baby fell asleep on Mercy. The light came in through the window on their faces and with the crib and photos in the background, as it always happens, I just knew that I finally had the photo I was looking for. At that point I told Mercy that that’s the part of photography that I enjoy - the part when I suddenly know I have found the photo that I am looking for. I’ve found with most of the photo shoots the first 20 minutes of shooting is almost always useless. It takes time for the pose to come. It takes time to relax and then suddenly it’s there.