My wife the other day politely asked me to stop taking her picture while she was making cookies. She didn't have her make-up on and hadn't done her hair.

I kept shooting. Some memories are worth the risk. When my wife and I are gone, the family will come across these photos and remember what her cookies tasted like.

Every family has a photographer. Not a professional picture taker per se, but the one person who does most of the photographing. In our family, it's me.

As the family's photojournalist, it's my job to capture us as we really are. Who needs hundreds of pictures of people with the same smile on their faces?

For more than 30 years, I have been taking pictures of my wife and daughters. The quality of my work ranges from horrible to not bad. Still, it's a good photographic chronology of our family.

In the basement are dozens of boxes packed with prints, negatives and CDs. There are photos of my girls in diapers, their first days at school, their first proms and vacation shots of them from Hawaii to New York.

My efforts to document the passage of our lives is sadly unappreciated at best and dangerously resented at worst. It's a lot like photographing wildlife.

For example, I have a fuzzy photo of my middle daughter getting ready to leave for her first school dance. Her date is pinning a corsage on her dress and looking at the camera with a shy, nervous smile.

My daughter is looking at the camera, too. She isn't nervous, though. The shutter captured her in the middle of screaming at me to stop. The only thing in focus is a set of fangs that belong on a sabertooth cat.

This isn't the worst or even most dangerous moment while documenting my family in the wild. I still have a dent in my skull courtesy of a bottle of shampoo when I tried a candid shower shot of my wife.

When digital photography came along, it increased my capabilities as a shutter nuisance. No longer did I have to wait to see how the shots turned out. And with rapid fire, I could easily afford to take hundreds where one used to suffice.

Still, it's not a good idea to take close-ups of teenage girls who are crying. I have an excellent series of the sole of a Nike runner heading toward my face at Mach 3.

Family photography is easier with grandkids. They love having their pictures taken. It just takes longer. The downside is that they immediately want to see themselves.

I have thousands of shots of my grandkids, every frame of which was followed by, "I wanna see. I wanna see."

My hope is that one day my family will appreciate my efforts. In the meantime, I'll keep cleaning cookie dough off my lens.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/notpatbagley.