I love the immediacy of this image from a series I took of my daughter on her birthday. Her beauty takes my breath away.

Hands, we all have them. We use them every day, they do all the hard work, pull, scrub, twist, push, touch, caress, and yet we take them for granted. They almost appear like automatic objects on the end of our arms. As I get older, I notice my own hands and those of loved ones more and more. I watch my hands age, I watch them hold my children, wield my paint brush, put the bins out, brush my daughter’s hair. They’re certainly not pretty but they are possibly the most me part of me. My children’s hands say so much about them too and their whole personalities are bond up in them for me. H’s hand are like my dad’s, short-fingered, with wide flat finger nails. He’ll carry his grand father in his hands every day of his life, every thing he does will be touched by generations gone by. H’s dirty, hard little hands carry a world gone by, a world right here, right now and a world yet to come.

An image of my beloved H taken with my Diana Camera before I realised that what you see through the view finder is not necessarily you see framed when you get that image back. Still, I do love my Diana Camera, the square format, the dreamy focus and the hit and miss nature of all the images. This links to the previous post in its framing too but most of all I just love those beautiful little chubby legs. My darling H sitting still for once. I photograph my children everyday, I love to record them. Photography really matters to me, a physical link to light that was bouncing around yesterday, last year, last decade, what could be more magical than that?