Had a great day yesterday. My father and his girlfriend came over for one of their semi-regular visits. We’ve seen them 3 times now, every two weeks. I’m glad that he was able to make some time in his schedule to come and visit his grandkids
We were also joined by our friends The Dunns. Jason brought his new digital Canon camera over, and we had fun taking some pictures of the kids. It was a learning experience, as the first batch of Alia were out of focus due to the AI in the camera constantly refocusing. Once we got that straightened out the second batch was much better.
Next time around we really have to work on the lighting though. Our hodgepodge of flash, floor lighting and bounced natural lighting didn’t give us as much depth as we’d like. Plus, it meant we were fussing with lighting and spending less time making the kids smile. Taking children’s photographs is an art unto itself. Mostly it requires lots of patience and experience. Granted, you still take shots with their eyes closed or their heads turned, but you have a standard set of poses to work with. our ratio yesterday was probably closer to 1 good for every 15 bad.
The hardest part was trying to do the pictures of them together and having them both smile or focus on the camera at the same time. In the end it was the single pictures that wound up coming out better.
It was a good first try though. We got enough decent stuff to make us (and more importantly the rest of the friends and family) happy for awhile. I probably even have enough shots to start working on a baby announcement.
It’ll take some time to play with color balance, fix some of the soft focus, etc. But who knows what we can turn out in a week or so. What’s important is that we took the first step in actually trying to pull something together and get motivated. I made a great collage of the photos you see here, added their names, and turned it into a wallpaper for my desktop.
Now I can look at my smiling kids all day long! Oh, and I didn’t even talk about the stupid dog. So we’re all in the kitchen working on the photos. We’ve got the photographers, the grandfather, the baby handlers, the audience.. the works… what don’t we have? Someone keeping an eye on the dog.
So Sebastian hangs out in the living room eating 2/3 of a tray of pepperoni and cheese. We come in at the plate has the near-perfect line of missing food on the lower 2/3 half. Why? Because that’s all that his grubby little head could reach from the floot. Luckily we didn’t come home from dinner to find the results of his little pepperoni-event all over his cage. I need to put ‘puppy-handler” on my list of requirements for the next photo shoot.
Hey, I just noticed that I lied to you.. the picture of connor on the wallpaper is his ‘Connor Curious”, not the smiley one… guess I gotta show that in full size too? Don’t get mad that I have more pictures of Connor up here Alia. I’ll make it up to you next time.
Also sorry for the jaggy layout of the images. One of the problems with images and html text and wrapping and the amount of space I have for the blog post.. guess you gotta deal with it. 🙂
happy
The pics are awesome! The lighting, the B&W and the color! Alia looks like a little princess with her arms around her head … and those dimples on Connor — watch out. The pic of him holding up his head could win an award. Excellent job of capturing their personalities and their physical milestones.
Of course, now we want / need to see more more more….
Told ya they were just a teaser… so….*tease*…. Out of the 3 or 4 dozen we shot we probably have about 5-10 really nice ones. So you’ve really seen half of them. We’ll let ya know as soon as we pull the rest together. Thanks for stopping by and visiting.
You know it consistently boogles me that men like you and Collin create such beautiful childern-LOL They must receive their mom’s good looks with such a good dose of your personality shining through as to make them such great looking kids.
The pics are awesome and the joy is even though you took dozens and dozens at least by time they are a year old you won’t have a stack of polarid’s as long as the kids are tall-LOL (my step mom really took that many pics of her first child-it was scary)
Thanks for posting the pics-it great to be able to see the kidlets at least this way since other Lakewood I’ve missed seeing them.
Hugs!
This post is certainly a nice contrast to the last one.
Q: Did “Connor Curious” get cropped a little close, or did I leave his right hand at the edge of the frame?
Still waiting for more…..