If you’ve been following this blog through the maternity series we did (here) or (here), you’ll know that my dad passed away 3 days before I gave birth to our little baby boy, Pierson Truce Frank.  This being the first death of someone I was truly close to, it made me think very hard about life, it’s meaning, how short it is, and how much is so completely unknown.  The death coming so close to the beginning of a life sort of “shrunk” my original feeling that life was so long.  All of a sudden it became incredibly short, and I felt frantic to “live” it, and live it hard,  and to try and pause it so it would last longer.

Of course, now, with father’s day this weekend, it stirred up all those feelings again.  I felt myself grab onto my camera for dear life, and snap as many pictures as I could of our little family.

And then it hit me.  This is why I love what i do so much. It’s because I can sort of “pause” life, I can keep it.  I can capture it in the form of tiny little pixels, and save it so I can return to it later.  It’s almost like I’m slowing life down.  No wonder I gravitate toward wedding photography, and birth, infant, and maternity photography…. because those moments pass by so quickly.  Not only are they beautiful things, but they are such important moments in life that, even though they are not necessarily “my” moments, they are incredible moments of celebration and happiness.

This is why photography is so important to me, and to so many other people.  It is not because you want to look vainly at yourself, it is because the moments that it captures are so incredibly important. This is why I focus on “real” moments, not posed ones.

I’m constantly fighting the urge to stop time, especially with Pierson getting big so quickly (he smiled for the first time today!).  But, until someone invents a way to pause life, or return to special moments, I think my profession comes about as close as it gets. I’m so glad I can do this for other people as well. I am so fortunate to do something that I love so very much.  Even just looking through the lens, I’m forced to slow down and really study something. It helps make sense of this crazy world we live in where everything moves a million miles per second.

I can’t imagine what I would do without these pictures of Pierson’s birth.  It makes me feel like it was just yesterday that he was born. My amazingly talented photographer friend, Esther, from esther louise photography took these for us.  My labor was only 4 hours long beginning to end, and only 4 pushes- seven minutes.  4 hours of completely natural labor, and an empowering 7 minutes of natural delivery. Pierson arrived into this world in a big tub of warm water at our birthing center (labor of love) into the arms of my husband. I have never felt so incredibly supported, loved, and at peace. It was the best four hours of my entire life, and because I have these pictures, I can go back and re-live it whenever I want to.  It helps pause life for me, helps me slow things down a little bit.