Learning to take portraits

As a child I remember being bored rigid when people showed me photographs of people they had met and I hadn't. I wasn't the slightest bit interested to know that these were Joyce and Roger or that those were Ken and Marge. So when I spent several months in the Middle East as a teenager with a Kodak Instamatic I made a point of taking no pictures of my friends. A decision I began to regret almost as soon as I returned home.
When I got my little Minolta 110 SLR I did take pictures of friends, not with the intention of boring anybody else rigid but just as mementos of happy times for myself. When that camera was stolen it wasn't replaced and I fell out of the habit of taking photographs altogether. My sister very kindly donated her old little Sony to me a couple of years ago and I have been happily snapping ever since, but mostly no portraiture, and again, I began to regret this as soon as my brother and his son left earlier this month.

So now that we have more family staying with us the little camera is being pointed at them as often as possible. Out at dinner and the kids were ducking under the table whenever the camera came out of its bag so here are some water bottles obstructing access to the fire hose reel at the open-all-year grill shop.