My eight-eight-years old daughter is eager to help me with processing photos from sports photoshoots. She has been looking over my shoulder for a while now and tried using Lightroom herself, to the point where she is fairly proficient at cropping (e.g., she the understands the rule of thirds and has a natural eye for using leading lines in composition) and basic exposure adjustments (e.g., she understands the concepts of black point and highlight clipping). It is apparently a great fun for her, and she treats it like some sort of computer game. This morning, she pulled the laptop away from me and started cropping a selection of photos from the last night’s basketball game.
“You can check them later,” she said to prevent my interfering.
She was clearly enjoying the process, commenting on the photos, the facial expressions of the players and how much fun it was to edit the images.
“I want photography to be my hobby too!” she exclaimed.
Naturally, I was quite happy that my daughter found whatever I do meaningful enough to make it her own. So I encouraged her: “By all means! Why not?!” Or something along these lines.
She kept going through the images, cropping each one and checking exposure. Gradually, she began to realize that the work was pretty tedious and repetitive, and that the image set was rather large.
“Are they actually paying you for this?” she asked after a while.
Enthusiasm curbed with pragmatism – she might be on her way to becoming a pro.
