Busy busy

I've been sick and busy and strangely without things to say recently.

I'm a bit disappointed too, because I found out a good friend form back home is pregnant, and I'd love love love to give her a gift of maternity and newborn portraits but... my new little one will only be about a month old when she has hers so I don't know that I can make it work. I can't travel in the last month of pregnancy, and I don't know that I want to fly with a one month old.

I've been taking a lot of studio type portraits recently. I got this great candid of my daughter earlier today.


So how's everyone else doing this December?

Trouble

I've been busily messing around with my new light setup and trying to make a go out of photography. Since I've gotten some great ones of some of the kids in my moms group I was thinking "I can do our family photo no problem."

First day I tried, I got so mad at trying to work with the timer I gave up.

Today I went and got my neighbor and asked her to snap a few for us. I had to assure her that everything was set up and all she had to do was click. She got comfortable with it pretty quickly. Then Lorelei decided she was completely against the idea of portraits.

We finally got a passable one of the card, but it definitely was NOT what I was going for.

At least it made for a good photo montage...

By "good" I do mean ridiculously silly.

Regrets?

Just today I saw that a girl who asked me to teach her how to shoot in manual has started her own photography business. The pictures are nice but it started me wondering why haven't I taken that plunge.

The only reasons I can come up with are, lack of confidence, lack of someone to watch the baby while I do sessions, and ... really that's about it.

I guess I have some soul searching to do, because every time I see that another person I have spoken to about photography has started a business in it and done well, I get a bit jealous, and that's not a good way to be.

More Camera Fun

I was experimenting with super slow shutter speed yesterday. I LOVE my digital for this. It was so much harder to play with when I had to wait for at least a day to see how it was going to turn out. The digital means being able to fine-tune it every shot.

Here are two from my first set.

These were taken with the aperture at 32, an ISO of 400 and a shutter speed of 8 seconds.


The baby is funny to get these pictures of because she is ALWAYS in motion if she is awake. Her head looks like a big blur in every slow shutter speed picture I took of her.

Christmas Cheer

My nod to Christmas.
We don't have any family here and aren't traveling so there's not much holiday cheer here. We do have a tree and are having Christmas dinner with some friends here, who were shocked to find out we were not going to be with family for the holiday.

We did go to the 37th street lights yesterday. It was a cold night and we were happy to discover that Lorelei now fits properly in the Ergo baby carrier. She does not, however, fit in her little snow suit. It makes her took much taller than she is, which is kinda adorable.
Seriously....look how long her legs look and then look how tiny her head is.


A little background.... unlike the Trail of Lights, the 37th street lights are simply lights on one block of a residential area in central Austin. It started with neighbors trying to one up each other and turned into an annual attraction. Fast forward 20+ years and of course some neighbors have moved and some houses are empty etc. Supposedly they "aren't as good" as they used to be because it's more just lights, less crazy artistic nonsense, but they are fun and free to see. Also, unlike the Trail of Lights, it doesn't require a shuttle bus to get to, which is a big selling point on a below freezing winter night when hauling a baby around.

A lot of people just drove there and there was a huge line for people waiting to drive down the block, but half the fun is the walking IMO so that's what we did.


We found parking only a block away and ambled down the block and then around the neighborhood before we got too cold and decided to go home to warm up.

A few highlights:

Gnomes being repressed


Flying Spaghetti Monster, or "Hi, How are you?"
Our group's consensus was FSM... The other one would not have come to mind except someone right behind us insisted it was the latter. After comparing both of them to the picture above I can see why someone might think it was the "Hi, How are you" but only if they had never seen the FSM.

I'm not quite sure what the message was supposed to be here.


My favorite, the Sock Monkey Nativity


And a family shot right before heading back to the car
I hope everyone has a great Christmas, and enjoys the days getting longer from here on out.

Imperfection in photographs

I have often liked the look of an imperfection. Found vintage photographs where parts of it are out of focus, but film was expensive and the imperfect photos found purchase in people's albums just as much as the perfect ones, because they were the only pictures that existed from that time. Now with previews on digital cameras it is easy to make sure you catch the moment in focus, with your subject's eyes open. You can even delete the "bad" ones before anyone else ever sees them.

In these days of everything new mentality, with perfect replicas of items produced in huge numbers lining the shelf, where it costs more to repair an item than throw it away and get a new one, the draw to imperfection is calling to many people-- just look at the success of Etsy, where almost everything sold there is (usually obviously) handmade.

I'm still drawn occasionally to the imperfect pictures. This is one of them, and I'm not sure why I'm drawn to it.


Any thoughts? Do you have a favorite picture that is technically not "good" but you love it anyways? Do you have a favorite item that is not shiny and new, but you prefer it that way? I'd love to hear about it.

That Tongue!

Lorelei has gotten very interested in her tongue recently. She spent a good twenty minutes the other night licking her dad's shirt when her got home from work. This series of pictures makes me laugh, and I am the one of those moods where I need to post a laugh.

No luck

I tried to submit some pictures to Dreamstime yesterday with the hope of making a little bit of money selling microstock photos. Turns out my photos, while technically good, aren't enough better than their current stock for them to accept.

I can't decide whether to give up on the idea, or to just try some other sites.

Rawr!

Lorelei loves this picture of herself too. Coming soon- a picture of her laughing at this picture on the computer screen. Tonight, we're off to a post-Halloween Halloween party. Which is good because we did nothing to celebrate yesterday but give away all but three pieces of our candy.

365 Woes

The 365 project is going... interestingly. 20some days into it and I'm a bit frustrated. Some days I take a bunch of great pictures and have a lot of trouble narrowing it down to one. Other days I don't get out of the house and have no desire to mess with the camera at all.... or if I do I just take another snapshot of a cat or the baby. I've now taken 481 pictures with the new camera, but still need to learn a lot of the manual functions and other features. One month almost down, 11 to go....

3 month portraits

I just got Lorelei's three month portraits back and they are beautiful! There is no way I could pick one favorite. Here are two of my favorites. If you like them you should check out the photographers website. Tiffany does great work and is wonderful with kids.
This second one is kinda goofy.... and that's why I like it! She's not always smiling and doll like, so why would I want pictures that only show that facet of her personality?

Kitten vs. baby

When working on taking my daily picture today, the kitten kept trying for her own photo op. But then she wouldn't cooperate beyond that when i tried to include her.

Inspiration

I was reading the wonderful blog of a photographer I ran across and found this quote...

"You are not there to capture their hobbies and the same smile with changing outfits. You are there to capture the spirit of who they are and the many faces that their spirit has."



She was talking about senior portraits.... but that's also true for kids portraits. Especially kids portraits in my opinion. They change so fast.. and there are already expressions I will never forget that Lorelei has stopped doing. Her "beak face" when she was going for food and some of her "playing with her tongue" faces have stopped as she's been moving on developmentally and she's only 3.5 months old. These moments are so much more precious than the "outfit that Aunt B gave her."