Dad behind the lens: an Ideal Father's Day with Roberto Chamorro
The holiday itself rounds only once a year, but let's be real - we couldn't do it without you awesome dads. Playing ball in green fields or grilling on summer nights are some of the fun pastimes many have been fortuned to enjoy. We caught up with industry dad in charge, and BTS photographer from petitePARADE Kids Fashion Week, Roberto Chamorro, to see what him and his rascals get up to when he's not on a jet or a set.
You'd be surprised how much a simple Whole Foods trip can turn into a longer than anticipated adventure. So we asked how he'll be spending Father's Day, some of his favorite moments from Kids Fashion Week & the 411 on his notorious family holiday card.
Check out our Q&A with kids fashion photographer and all-star dad, Roberto Chamorro.
pP: Fathers Day is the 19th, what's your ideal way to spend your special Sunday?
RC: The perfect day for me would be hanging out in my backyard with my family, grilling, creating with my boys and lounging on the hammock. I travel so much that just a simple plan like that is enough. Normally we fill our weekends entertaining the kids and are always on the move. If we’re not at a museum, birthday party or special kid event, we're on other adventures (aka Target, Ikea and whole foods). So a day just lounging at home and not doing much other than spending quality family time is to me, the perfect day.
pP: Between traveling and working as an industry dad, what's your favorite thing to do with your kids?
RC: My boys love building and creating. We have Friday movie night and as cliche as it sounds, when it's just me and my kids we take over the living room with fort building. We raise the bar every time and literally take every pillow, cushion and blanket from the house to create these architectural masterpieces. Once complete, we lay in it to watch the movie with popcorn in hand. Besides that, I love going to the park to skate with them. They are getting better everyday, which makes them enjoy it even more.
pP: Advice to amateur iPhone photographers on capturing a photo of their kids?
RC: Catch them off guard and be spontaneous; trying to get them to laugh right before taking the photo works well, too. It gives the images a more natural feel in my opinion.
pP: You shot backstage at petitePARADE Kids Fashion Week in NY - what was your favorite moment BTS?
RC: To be honest, there were so many good moments. Every time a new set of kids came into the studio to be photographed, the energy that was still trailing them from the runway was infectious. Kids say the funniest things too, so its hard not to have a smile from ear to ear when working with them. Along with that, working with the petitePARADE team was also a favorite element of the day! Amazingly fun crew of people!
pP: There's a mini-notorious picture of your little guy covered in tattoos that was reposted thousands of times, can you tell us the story of it?
RC: Yeah, that picture has caused quite a stir! It was early December and I was leaving on a work trip. Once that job ended, I would fly directly to Miami to meet my family for Christmas. The night before my trip, my wife Genevieve asked me to shoot a picture of my boys for our holiday card. I had been procrastinating that project for weeks and now it was go time and basically the only time to do the photo. I got home that night around 6pm and the plan was to draw some fake Christmas tattoos on the boys for the photo but it was close to the witching hour and they didn’t have the patience they normally do, to sit there while I drew on them. In the end the drawings didn’t turn out that great as they moved constantly during the process. A few days later I spent some time on the image with photoshop to add more realistic tattoos on them and once complete, I sent it off to my wife to have printed. We made 100 cards and sent them to friends and family.
It was a major hit with them and after some laughs we eventually forgot about it and moved on with the year. Unknown to us, somebody we sent it to, took a photo and posted it on their Facebook page. No biggie right? Well, two months later, my cousin that lives in Spain emailed us a screenshot of the photo posted on an instagram feed called tattoos of instagram. The account had 2 million followers and the image quickly went viral. Soon it was everywhere! My wife and I got bombarded with endless texts from friends seeing the image in different places. Then Nicole Richie posted it, followed by a few other celebrities, athletes and even VOGUE's instagram account. It was pretty crazy. I even had to ask a couple of Tattoo removal companies to remove it from their page because they were using it as an Ad for tattoo laser removal. It was ridiculous. We monitored it for quite some time, and had it removed off sites we thought they shouldn’t be on. But in the end we realized that fighting the internet is a losing battle and takes a huge amount of time.
Last we counted, the photo had over 3 million likes. We can’t help but laugh since it was really just a quick unplanned shoot for our personal Holiday card.