I’ve always been much more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. That’s partly because I enjoy taking photos but mostly because I hate how I look in them.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not exactly Daniel Craig. In terms of physique, the celebrity my body shape most resembles is the Michelin man.

You know that saying about how the camera adds ten pounds? Well, if that’s the case I must be permanently wearing four of the things.

Photographers need a special wide-angle lens to fit me in to pictures.

And so on, and so on.

That’s the funny thing about being a camera-shy blogger. I have written literally hundreds of posts laying bare the details of life as a dad. Should they ever read this blog, my kids will uncover a wealth of detail about me and how I feel about them.

However, while they’ll find hundreds of pictures of themselves, they won’t find many of me. In part this is because I’m usually the one taking the pictures – as a youngster, Isaac was so accustomed to having his photo taken that he would refer to my DSLR as my ‘black beak’ – but even so you won’t find many selfies of me. I can count the number of photos in existence of our entire family on the fingers of, well, one finger. (You’ll find it here.)

So when the opportunity to do a family photo session at the boys’ school came up, I was press-ganged into making a for-one-night-only appearance as a photographic model.

In truth, I was not an unwilling participant. Even I acknowledge that we really do need more photos of the five of us. And it was fun to watch Bex from Bexboater Photography successfully coaxing cute poses from our three kids, who seemed to think that they had turned up for a gurning competition. (They never pose for me. Virtually every photo I have of them is a ‘candid’ shot where I have caught them unawares and grabbed a quick snap before they realise I’ve pulled out my phone. Seriously, I could have been one of those gunslingers you see in westerns – I’m that quick on the draw.)

So now we’re just waiting to see what magic Bex has worked and hopefully we might have a second presentable photo of the five of us. Fingers crossed.

Despite my reluctance to appear in photos, we definitely need more family pictures to capture our journey through the years in more than just words on a web page. Hopefully we’ll do this again. But for now I’ll be quite happy to put my modelling career back on the back-burner and return to being behind the camera.

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