7 things I’ve learned this year – good, and not so good! How did YOUR year go? What did you learn from it, and what’s the best and worst things that happened?

Find out how to navigate the line between being the Party Pest because your phone’s constantly in front of your face, and documenting it just enough so you can look back later and value the memories you’ve caught. And yes, share them on Facebook! (But later. Don’t “post and party”!)

How do we safeguard against turning into “That Person”? The one who experiences events only through the lens of a smartphone and judges it by the likes given on Facebook? How do we walk that line of immortalising the event highlights in photographs yet still be fully there in the moment to enjoy and really experience it? Can it even be done, or have we gone too far?

Simply putting your photographs on Facebook may well keep the aunties happy, and it might satisfy your hankering for “likes”, but it’s certainly not taking advantage of the psychological and emotional benefits your children will get when the photos are on the walls of your home or in an album which can actually be physically touched on a regular basis.

I’m now a children and family photographer in Edinburgh, but it’s not only children and families I photograph, and not only in Edinburgh I do it.  In fact, before I got into portrait work, I really enjoyed taking landscapes, and often still do. It’s not difficult to find fabulous subject matter on your doorstep when you come from Inverness-shire, I’ll tell you! Here’s how Tea Break Tog helped me.

Bagpipers photos in Edinburgh instead of my normal family portraiture was a bit different! Meet Glyn Morris of www.scottishbagpipers.com, Scotland’s premier piper. There were some interesting and completely unforeseen “issues” which occurred during this session!