As an adult I have discovered a love of cooking. Sure, it can get mundane on a day-to-day basis, but I enjoy creating something tasty. I especially enjoy learning how to cook food that is much more expensive to eat out. Recently when I went to Costco, I was in the pork section and noticed they had pork bellies. So I wanted to try and recreate a  Samgyeopsal-gui dish. So I found a recipe that included the sauces that go along with the dish and tried it out. It was a hit on the first try. Enjoy some images of my cooking:

You never know what’s going to happen when you try to take portraits of babies. Throw in the extra unpredictability of kids of any age and it’s a crapshoot whether a photo shoot is going to turn out to be fun with rewarding photos or a series of photos of your children crying.

One thing we have on our side with the studio being in the basement is that we can take photos when the kids are ready, not on a hope and prayer that they’ll be ready when we get to Sears, Target, or wherever people are getting portraits done nowadays. So we started off with easy portraits in the morning on the “Baby Portrait Couch”. Hey, it’s a tradition started with Scarlett!

You’re never 100% sure what kids are going to enjoy. We know that Scarlett loves painting. Would she love coloring Easter Eggs? The answer was YUP!

I’ve been watching Gavin Hoey’s GREAT series on studio lighting. While he has a better studio than I do, he still has a small home studio so I find his advice and tutorials match what I’m able to accomplish. When I saw this video ( https://youtu.be/PIoWwx-elCE) I really wanted to try it out.

https://youtu.be/CMkLFL9NJoI

You might remember the photos from Scarlett’s birthday party. For some reason Dina wanted to hide when holding Sam. Her shoulder and back ended up being incredibly distracting in the photo. It would have been better if she would have just stood up and held him normally rather than pretend he was sitting on his own. Since we weren’t planning for this shot, I didn’t have a corresponding shot of the blank wall. Because she was not surrounded on both sides by the wall, it was hard to use the healing brush. So the guys over at Pixls.us helped me figure out this technique.