Muse.  Well, it can mean a couple of different things, but the first thing I think of when I hear muse, is inspiration.  I knew upon hearing the topic that most likely the main subject photographed this week would be the photographer's children.  They are inspirational little creatures, kids.  You may think I took the easy way out when looking at my photo(s).  It is indeed featuring my little sweetie, but she's expressing something that is my inspiration.  What really inspired me to begin with to take photos?  I always liked photography, and when I took my first class it was merely taken as exploration, I never intended to become a photographer.  The photographs that really draw me in are those that capture those moments where the subject becomes completely themselves, and you can celebrate, empathize, or just be with them.  The photos that impart some sort of truth.  When I started photography classes after I decided to make a career of it, my first inclination was to be a photojournalist.  Those are the folks that seem to really get those shots of raw emotion.  Dorothea Lange's photos of the Great Depression spring to mind.  However, life took a different path, and here we are.  Anyway, true emotion....that's what I wanted to capture this week.  I would have loved to scour the city looking for a perfect shot of unknowns that could be my subjects, but see previous post....so the most logical place for me to look for true emotion is from the little wonder in my life that goes through pretty much every emotion on a daily basis.  I wanted a huge big laugh, I wanted to have just a wide open laughing mouth, and I wanted the shot to be in black and white (so that the focus turns to the emotion and not the colors).  All of those things didn't exactly happen.  I couldn't get that big belly laugh out of my girl when I had the chance to get the camera in my hand, and I couldn't quite get a good focus on just the mouth with her bouncing all over the place....and I'm a big believer in not cropping a photo if you can help it.  So this is what we came up with.

The first one is from this morning, my real attempt at this week's project.  Not exactly a smile at all, but I do love the sense of wonder she has.

This next one is the closest thing I could come up with in my photos from this week that comes closest to showing the emotion I was going for.  Plus, I had to crop.