Capturing the delicious flavors of summer will help you remember these precious few months. This could mean collecting vegetables from your own garden, heading to the u-pick fields, setting up a lemonade stand, grilling a backyard feast, or visiting your favorite ice cream shop while on vacation.

Beyond capturing these actual activities you can add some storytelling to the images. Ask the your children to find the biggest blueberry, share their ice cream with their cousin, take the biggest bite of watermelon or go bobbing for corn. Catching your children in action will keep them interested and help you capture authentic emotion.

We don’t want to miss those moments just because it isn’t golden hour. The touch and texture of summer can be captured through detail images as well as macro images.

Using the subjects’ body as a shield from the sun you can then focus on the summer details such as dirt under the fingernails, the juicy drip of a popsicle, wind blown hair, and bare feet on the driveway.

Summer is a great time to work on using composition in a purposeful way while capturing beautiful sights! Look for symmetrical rows of plants and you can use the natural beauty to create a strong center composition.

Use footprints on the beach as leading lines and shoot through some sea oats or flowers for framing. Make the environment or weather the main subject and your child as the sub story.

Summer also is a fantastic time to work on landscape photography by shooting sunrises, sunsets, mountain views or beach views.

The crack of thunder with lightning following closely behind is a sure sign of summer in Florida. The music from the ice cream truck fills me with both dread and excitement during the summer (more treats, yet cute pictures!).

Pre-sunrise bird chirping always wakes me on our New England summer trip while seagulls remind me of the Florida beaches. After giving some thought to the sounds of your summer start brainstorm how to capture them through your images.

Distinctive smells that remind me of summer include the smokiness of a campfire, the sweetness of a patch of wildflowers, the crisp summer breeze coming off of the water, the salty air of the ocean, and the aroma of a freshly mowed lawn.

In addition to capturing your children roasting marshmallows, running in a flower field, and building sand castles at the beach consider taking some landscape and still art images that you can display around your home which definitely beats stock art and will be a year long reminder of summer!

My love of photography involves capturing my kids involved in activity and moving their body. Exerting energy through moving, exploring, jumping, laughing, and running. And these movements about sum up summer! So, be sure to capture your kids in motion!

(proprioception is the sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement)