I made some portraits of Scarlett. I used the same setup as when I did Sam and Stella’s November portraits, except with the octobox on the left this time.
Somewhat without intention, I’ve ended up alternating portraits for the twins between outdoor portraits and indoor portraits. This year was time for indoor portraits. (Although, to be fair, if it hadn’t been freezing, I might have ended up breaking the tradition) Here’s the setup I used:
It’s a variant on a setup that has been very successful for me with portraits of the kids. I went back to a white background for the first time in a few years. The last time I used it with Scarlett I had an uneven white that looked horrendous to my eye and was a real pain in the butt to try and correct in Photoshop (or was it GIMP?). I never got it quite right and ended up sticking to the black background for a while. But I wanted to do something different. So this time I grabbed my two studio strobes (I believe they’re 100W strobes that someone got me as a present some 8 or so years ago) and threw them into umbrellas to make sure the light would hit the background evenly. With these lights I had to go to somewhere around 80% power in order to get a pure white background according to the spectrograph in camera. Then I posed the twins in front of those lights, so they needed a light for themselves. I used my old Canon 580EX inside of my gigantic octagon (I think it’s somewhere around 3 feet or more in diameter). I wanted to shoot at F8 to try and get the best chance of ensuring the twins would be in focus, so I had to push the 580EX to full power. After this session, I ended up buying a bracket so that next time I can throw my 430EX in there, too.
Sparklers were an ever-present feature of my childhood 4th of July celebrations. This year we introduced the twins to sparklers (I’m pretty sure Scarlett has used them at least once before). They kids had a lot of fun and there were a couple burn-scares, but I think it was worth the slight parental anxiety. (Did our parents care? They seemed a lot more laize-faire about us with sparklers, but maybe they were just good at hiding their fears?) Took out the DSLR and introduced the kids to light painting. Scarlett had the winning light-painting photo that made it past the multiple discard passes.
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to ask the twins what they did that day while they were isolated from each other.
Stella: “We played LEGO and built a lot of cool things.”
Sam: “We went to Costco and then came right back home.”
Mind you, they both had the exact same day and did the exact same things. If I had to guess at why they focused on the things they did, I’d say that Sam’s answer was based on the fact that he likes to go out, especially to the park. So he was upset they’d left the house and hadn’t done anything he found fun. I’m not sure why Stella only focused on the LEGOs, but she is still playing with them a few days later, so maybe she was really happy to have new things to play with.
Over the years I’ve taken many, many photos of my kids at Coney Island. Lots of them have come out great. But I think this batch of photos is among the best photos I’ve taken of the kids at Coney Island thus far.
In some cases, it’s the expressions on the twins’ faces.
I’m on a motorcycle!
I see you!
Yeah, I know how to use this
Other times, I succeeded in getting the perfect action shot.
Sam sat on my lap and looked at the keyboard on the desk. At first he tried to do the ABCs, but he was stymied by the QWERTY layout. So then he looked at the numbers. He started with 1 and counted up. As Scarlett did before him, he automatically said “10” when he got to the 0. I told him, “That’s not 10, that’s 0”. To which he replied, “Zero doesn’t belong here! It belongs here! [pointing to the beginning of the row of numbers]”.
Scarlett was watching Peg + Cat which has an episode called Mack the Fork. So she asked me if that was a song and I told her that Mack the Knife was a song and she asked me to play it. Then the following exchange with my 3.5 year old happened:
Back in March it was an incredibly windy day so we decided to go to the park to fly a kite. I also took my DSLR because it’d been some time since I’d used it and thought I might get some good shots. This one was my favorite one and I thought it really captured a special moment.
Since becoming a parent it’s been a common theme of the blog that I find it fascinating experiencing the kids getting older and, therefore, more able to process the world around them. This winter was the first time the twins could be out in the snow for more than just a few minutes. Not only were they more able to weather the cold, but they were also strong enough to move around in the snow without too much frustration. They were also finally able to have a snowball fight. Although, watch Sam’s face closely from beginning to end in the following video, it’s priceless:
If there’s one pleasure I was denied by growing up in Florida, it was getting to play with the fall leaves. (Of course, I was spared having to rake them - something that takes me a good afternoon here if I do it well). But my kids get to enjoy it.
Sam in the leaves
Sam’s expression notwithstanding, I wonder what it is that kids enjoy about it. Is it making a mess of a pile? Is it the crunch of the leaves? The novelty of it all? Scarlett’s been doing it for a while and she still enjoys it. Whatever it is - I’m glad I get to be there to see it and enjoy their enjoyment.
Funny thing about this is that I could say this reflects their moods, but really only Stella is being genuinely Stella. Usually you can’t catch Sam without a smile on his face (although he *is* going through the whiny 2 year old phase), and Scarlett’s the most neutral.
Danielle and I went to Mount Vernon back when we first moved here and were exploring new things to do in our free time that were unique to the area.
We’d thought of bringing our parents to see Washington’s house and property, but the timing never quite worked out - you really want to visit in the Spring or Fall, not during the Summer or Winter. So it remained a place we’d only been to once even as we made multiple trips to the same couple Smithsonian museums and zoos.
This Easter we went to the farm so they kids could hunt for eggs there and then enjoy the farm. Unlike my childhood, Easter’s pretty cold up here as you can see.
It’s pretty ridiculous to me, considering almost my entire childhood consisted of going to the local park.
Stella’s been enjoying horseback riding for a bit now, but this was the first time she was old enough to do it on her own without me holding onto her the entire time.
Back in November we took the twins on their first trip to Disney. This time around Scarlett wasn’t as interested in the parades as she was last time, but the twins were REALLY into them. Surprisingly, both twins ended up warming up to the characters. Sam’s reluctance with Mickey on the first day made me think he was going to try and avoid them the entire trip. But as you can see in the video, he eventually got into interacting with the characters.
Each of the three kids is a little different, of course. Sam LOVES loud things. He loves cars and trains and planes and …. lawnmowers! When I cut the grass he follows me around. When others cut the grass he wants to follow THEM around.
I can’t believe how much they’ve grown. Summer 2016 we were pushing them around in this car, now they’re pushing it around. (Youtube vids which may not carry over to FB - you may need to click through to the blog)
If you’re an only child, you don’t know what it’s like to have to live with your kiddie tormentor. Growing up, the three of us each alternated as the aggressor and the aggrieved. As Stella proves here, you don’t have to the the oldest to be the one causing issues.
One of my favorite photo sets was from the first time Scarlett was running around chasing bubbles. I tried to do the same with the twins, but since they were less familiar with bubbles, they decided to catch them with their faces…
The photos appearing over the next few days are from the first time we took them out to run around on the driveway. Before that, they’d always been pushed in tricycles or strollers.
[caption id=“attachment_12341” align=“aligncenter” width=“840”] Sam’s First Carousel Ride[/caption]
Why do kids enjoy carousel rides so much? Shoot, why do we have so much nostalgia for them as adults? I have no idea. I could probably put together some BS about a cultural memory of horseback riding, but frankly I think it’s just the first amusement park ride a kid is able to go on. This is Disney before your tiny brain can even comprehend the existence of such a place. And, unlike a car, I think it’s pretty evident even to the kids that there is no utilitarian function here - you end up roughly where you started.
I figured this might be the only year I can pick their costume, so I *had* to go with The Wonder Twins from the old Super Friends cartoon. My mother-in-law sewed up the awesome costumes.
While I think that part of what really makes this image work is the way I converted it to black and white, I do really envy my wife for having a good eye and good timing to capture the photo.
When I was dating Danielle, during one of the trips to her house I asked to see old family photos. That was a big tradition in our house as I got the bug for documenting things with photography from my mother. Each of my brothers and I have about two dozen photo albums full of photos of us from back when you had to pay for film and pay for development. They had but a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the photos my mom did, but one photo that cracked me up was a photo my future father-in-law had taken of Dina (future sister-in-law) and one of Danielle’s cousins punished, crying against the wall. It was a funny image, but baffling that it’d be something worth capturing, especially in the film days. And I saw him do it with the new generation of kids as Danielle’s cousins started having kids.
Stella loves anything she can climb on. Scarlett hasn’t developed a love for climbing trees, but Stella might. Put anything in front of her that’s a bit off the ground and she’ll try to get on top of it. Not sure if she’s trying to reach what the adults and her big sister can or if she’s just climbing it for the same reason people climb Everest: Because It’s There.
Sam constantly reminds me of Linus from The Peanuts. He loves nothing better than to cuddle with a nice soft blanket or toy and he can’t keep his thumb out of his mouth. I was successful in keeping Scarlett from getting into that and we had to make Stella stop because she kept throwing up. No luck with Sam, but I’ve yet to see a mentally stable adult sucking their thumb, so we’ll get through it eventually. (First time parents should remember that with everything - like potty training - have you ever seen someone who doesn’t have mental issues who isn’t a potty trained adult?)
The funny thing about this age is that the kids start making all kinds of faces at the adults. But for the most part, I doubt it really means anything. For the most part they’re learning by imitating and trying things out and seeing what kinds of reactions they get. But we can’t help but ascribe intentions to their facial expressions. Then again, we do this with inanimate objects, it’s part of what makes us human. (Or at least puts us in a small category of animals)
I took this photo back in August. I’ve said it before on the blog when talking about Scarlett, but it’s incredible how much the babies change in their first year. Sure, at this point it’s 100% of his life. But eventually you reach this age where you don’t really change all that much from year to year. You get a little fatter or skinnier and maybe lose a little hair, but it’s on going back multiple years where you really see the change. But look at Sam closer to birth:
Scarlett’s first time at the beach was much younger - five or six months - but with the twins it was just a lot harder to go on vacation. There are two of them to deal with, to pack formula for, etc. Also, for a long time Stella would spontaneously throw up. We’d dealt with that with Scarlett when we went on the trip to her first Christmas - where she kept throwing up in the car. It’s not fun.
We’re hardly ever dressed up so nicely. So when we all got dressed up for Dan’s engagement party, I wanted to get a quick family portrait before we left. The pose wasn’t perfect due to the rush, and I’ll be elaborating a bit more on that in a future blog post, but I do like it as a bit of record keeping. Slightly more than a snapshot, but not how I’d have done it if we weren’t in a hurry.
So much I want to say all at once…I hate when that happens - makes me wish we could speak in parallel threads. Well, I guess I’ll start with the credit. There are lots of photos I’ve posted on here taken by Danielle. But usually by the time I get a chance to post photos I can’t remember for sure who took the photos. Generally, if the photo is taken with the Canon Powershot S100 it’s a greater than 80% chance it was taken by Danielle. But not only has not much time passed since the photo was taken (allowing me to know it was Danielle who took it), but it’s just so perfect, I had to make sure to credit her for having the photographic eye.
I meant to write about the lighting setup in the blog post in which I uploaded the photos from the 7 Month photo shoot, but with twin 7 month olds, there’s never enough time for anything - even with my mother-in-law in town helping us out. Oh well, at least I don’t have to pay per post.
First of all, I’d like to discuss the concept I wanted to go for. For the Five Month photos, I went with the balloon theme I posted about here. For month six, I didn’t do anything special. Danielle did her usual couch portraits. But this time around I had a bit more time for the photos and I started thinking about it a week or two in advance. Unlike 2 months ago, both children were able to sit on their own now for extended periods of time. As of when I took the 7 month photos, the only thing that made them tip over was when they got over-excited and tipped back. It’d been a while since I had done portraits with the black background and I wanted to switch it up a bit. Because I don’t have any formal photography training, I like to browse the work of other photographers to get ideas I can take and make my own. Gavin Hooey, who has a great series of videos on Youtube through the photography store Adorama, has a dark grey background at his studio. He likes to have a highlight behind the model rather than just a plain dark background. If you look at his photos, he does it more often than he doesn’t. I figured it might help with the look of the photos. If you don’t do it, then you really do need to use a light as a hair light in order to keep dark-haired subjects from merging into a black background.
When Danielle brought out a hoodie for Sam a few weeks ago, I knew I had to photograph him in it for the incongruity of him just being a little baby in a hoodie. But I wasn’t sure what look I was going to go for. Then I remembered my snoot. Hooked that up to the flash and boom, no need for Photoshop or anything - this is exactly how it came out of the camera.
Danielle mentioned that it looked like I’d messed around with the image because the strings on Sam’s photo looked fake. Actually, that’s how it was captured in the camera. The strings were reflective and, as I’m about to get into, there was a lot of light in this shoot. There are only two things I did to edit these photos. For both of them, the balloons ended up floating higher than the backdrop. So I had to extend the backdrop digitally. Luckily for other reasons that I’ll get into in the lessons learned section, I’d been trying to blow out the background and make it pure white. In computer terms, I wanted it represented by (255,255,255) or pure white. So it was less of a pain to extend the background to make it look real - I didn’t need to use a clone or healing brush. It was already white so I just painted in white (I actually did something a little more complex, but this is fine for the analogy). For Sam’s photo, the balloons and strings caused a bit of a shadow behind the strings so it’s not pure white there. The strings are so skinny that it wasn’t worth trying to paint over this with white. I tried a couple times and then gave up and reverted it.
When Scarlett was born, I went a little crazy. Sure, it’s natural for first time parents, especially someone with my personality. But I think I also deserve some slack because it was a difficult, complicated pregnancy and then Scarlett needed surgery in her first week of life in order to live.
So when I saw myself starting to act crazy again (after another crazy pregnancy with premie babies), my solution was to withdraw. If I didn’t get too attached, I wouldn’t have such visceral reactions to my underweight daughter not eating. So I threw myself into my books and video games. It was made easier by the fact that my mother in law was here, so I had more opportunities to run off. But then, a week ago (and I’m writing this post about a month before this will appear on my blog), I realized that I had been letting their infancy slide past me without enjoying it. And so I put myself back into their lives. This was made easier by nearly five months of the doctor weighing Stella and finally being OK with her weight. Also, we’d found out she was lactose intolerant and switching her away from mother’s milk and cow-based formula caused her to transform into a happy baby. But now I’m really enjoying the heck out of the twins and it’s a joy to see them each day.
Just in case the captions for the photos don’t appear on your RSS reader or on Facebook, here’s what I wrote as the caption to the photos:
“Inspired by title I chose for my photo for the twins’ four month photo which didn’t come out quite the way I wanted it to, I decided to do this image. I love how it came out.”
I also usually don’t post more than one version of a photo - I have a definitive version and just go with that, but this time Scarlett came up while I was trying to to figure out which one I preferred and she insisted on a different one than I would have chosen, so I decided to share them all.
I wanted to do this earlier - somewhere around 2 month portraits. I was re-energized to try the idea after seeing someone do a photo that made it look like their kid was bounding out of the crib with her stuffed animals. I did not take the Sam and Stella images from some other random image. They were right there where you see them. All I did was erase my body (or I’d be in here thrice). Still, if I were to do it again, I’d have Sam and Stella flying near me rather than against the wall. They end up too small and it lessens the impact of the shot. Well, there’s always next time. (And there’s always less edited shots!)
Been taking lots of shots of the kids, but one finally came out nice!
(edit: Ah, I figured it out, I can’t let the blog create resized versions of my giant files. To get the original size file (for printing) click here! It will look horrible in your web browser)
Sam’s human looks like something that belongs on Rick and Morty
Sam at the Bronx Zoo
I’m on a motorcycle!
I see you!
Yeah, I know how to use this
Sam’s duck
Sam in the leaves
Sam’s First Carousel Ride[/caption]
Up in the jungle gym at Centennial[/caption]
