Current mood:

amused

Children, Photo and Video
I have two children, a 10 year old girl and a 2 years old boy. Yes, there are differences among boys and girls, but this is not what this post is about.

When my daughter was born, I was much younger, studying photography for about a year, using film and was not thinking about making a living on it. I wanted to be an amateur. Good at it, but still amateur. When my son was born, things were about the same, but I already had worked on a few photographic jobs and when he was six months old I bought my first (and as today only) digital camera. Six months later, I was trying to make a living with photography. Things changed drastically.

My daughter has many film pictures, my son, few. Both have many "digitals". Both are used to see a camera from the moment they were born. (I even photographed my son's birth.)

With film, the story is similar. I bought a VHS-C camera when my daughter was about 2 years old, and bought a digital one (Mini-DV) when she was about between 4 and 7 (can't remember). My son always lived around cameras, both photographic and video ones.

That whole thing is the prologue, the story begins now.

Having a second kid as you are older (ok, not THAT old, but after the 30s) is a great opportunity to watch him grow. I have saw my daughter growing, but I was still learning. With the second kid, you already know what to do, you just need to adapt to his/her particularities. As my kids were much the same, that was easy to do, so I could focus on "watching" rather than "learning".

Kids are very open to new experiences. Of course, even "walking" is "a new thing", so they easily get used to anything new. My son can use the touchpad and button of my PowerBook, that is, he knows that he has to "click" on the button (as I hate clicking on touchpads, so I disable this feature), and he learned it just seeing us using the touchpad. It's not that he is smarter than anyone. Kids are like that. Let them learn, and they will. Treat them like dumb, and they will. Simple like that.

So... he's lived with photographs around since ever. I do print lots of photographs (for my wife), and some are near life size (for me). And he recognizes photographs, and people on photographs, and he knows that photographs are photographs: instants fixed in a paper (or in his case, in a monitor more often than not).

He has seen many pictures, he has seen than on many mediums: a computer monitor, a printed photograph, from a projector (I just love slides!), and on the TV on his bedroom. He has seen it all.

We also have several videos of both of them, which for obvious reasons we don't watch often. (Obvious as in no one can really see "home videos" frequently. Ewww.) And we also have a good collection of DVDs for children (alright, I also see it alone, ok?). It's not that he does not know what a movie is, he knows. But he's not used to "people" on his movies.

And it leads to something that happened that I thought was pretty weird.

I was reviewing a video I was editing that have some children from his school, older children that he knows (my daughter's colleagues), and it was fine. He recognized some of them (all that he knew) and that's all.

But them, my daughters appeared, talking to the camera. And he goes like:

- Hi, Sis!

And the video goes on...

- Hi, Sis!

The video keeps rolling (ha! rolling... :) )

- Sis?

Then, he looks at me, and starting to cry says:

- Why 'Sis' don't answer to me?

- What?!?

- I'm talking to Sis, she doesn't answer.

- Vini, it's just a movie.

- But, I'm talking to her, she doesn't answer to me.

Here, he IS crying, and he is mad at his sister for not talking to him.

I stopped the video. Could end its edition later.

This scene repeated similarly a few days later, with another video.

What amazes me is that he couldn't go over the "reality" of the video, he couldn't detach it from "now". He really thought it was his sister that was on TV, and that she refuses to talk to him.

I really don't know what to do to "ease" his learning on it, rather than keep showing videos to him with real people on it. Maybe show a video of her, with her watching. I don't know. I really don't know.

It's amazing how our reasoning is built, how we develop. It's great to be given the possibility of watching how it works in a child.

Time to sleep, as they are both sleeping and my time has come. (Did you really thought I could write here while they are awake?)