I officially missed the 3 month pictures, but i wasn’t about to let the 4 month slip by as easily. These were all taken by my big picture window in my living room. The only thing that I will miss about the winter is the consistent light the cloud cover provides for me. I’m going to have to figure something else out for the summer shoots!

Well, I finished processing the third session from this weekend just in time to leave for Palm Springs. This little cutie is a co-works daughter. I have been trying to use more natural lighting lately. I really don’t think you can beat it when comes to photographing babies. The top photo is taken next to a window and the bottom is flash. The problem is you need a lens that can handle the low light. Speaking of which,  I have a nice two week break before the photography stuff starts picking back up again so I decided to ship off my 24-70 2.8L to canon to get it fixed. It will focus in auto mode, but it wont in manual. Clearly this is something that needs to be fixed before wedding season! I’m already in the hole $40 with shipping, hopefully it wont be too much to fix!

Here are a couple more from the busy weekend. Ashley and I were in  birthing class with JayDee & Azeena… and i guess their daughter was there too : -) Marayva is roughly a month older than Avery. We have been hanging out quite a bit since our classes last fall. It’s nice to know someone that is going through all the same crap (I mean joy) that you are. I was processing their photos and immediately started laughing when this one popped up.  I felt like she was screaming at me to hurry up! Anyway, they are great friends and I look forward to seeing our daughters grow up together.

My wife and daughter were out of town this weekend, so I booked 3 photography sessions for Sunday thinking I would have all the time in the world to set up, shoot and process photos. Daylight savings got the best of me again… I ended up rushing out the door because I forgot about the time change and had no more than 20 minutes in between each session. On the bright side, I have been waking up at 5:30 and fighting off the urge to go to sleep at 8:30 J I’m starting to think Arizona has the right idea by forgoing the whole time change thing. Anyway, here are a few from the first session. You may recognize Lauren from some of my other posts. She has a new brother on the way; I defiantly look forward to taking more photos of the two of them!

These were from a family shoot last weekend. I really prefer to shoot outdoor family photos, but the weather just doesn’t  allow for it in Oregon during the rainy months. One of the other primary reasons for my preference though is that it really is a pain to set up my studio lighting for every session. I envy the photographers that have studios with their strobes set up and ready to go, quite literally, at the the flip of a switch. What makes it even more difficult is that I offer to set up my gear at customers houses. I’m really only taken up on this offer when kids are involved, because it is so much easier to bring the photographer in rather then pack up and head out to the studio. Now, all that being said, I think you get better results when the kids are comfortable at home.  This was a fun session. These two are six years apart, just like my brother and I. Oh the times ahead of them…

I’ve been using my flashes a lot  lately as a result of cloudy weather and earlier sunsets.  This weekend I wanted to try to stay away from the flashes if possible, so  I scheduled this quick family shoot for 4pm thinking we would have enough light for some outside shots. However, I forgot Daylight Savings ended Sunday morning which pushed the light back to what was the equivalent of 5pm! I thought I was screwed, but in the last few moments of daylight the clouds broke on the horizon and we got about 3 min of soft setting sun. I had to fight the urge to take the easy way out which would have been simply pointing them into the sun and shooting. Instead I used it as a back light and used my flash to fill in on the front side. This is something I probably wouldn’t have thought about doing a year ago…

This little cutie is just as much fun to be around as she was a year ago. I’m soon going to be in the business of watching kids grow up, so I was excited to see her again. Just like last year, all she did was look at the camera and smile. I was finding chocolate frosting on myself several hours after the shoot, so I’m sure her mother is still finding it on her!

Sunsets are hit and miss this time of the year in Oregon. If you want to practice with lighting during one. you really cant hesitate or it will be cloudy before you know it. I packed up my gear and sweet talked my wife into being my test subject the other day. This is with a two strobe set up. One strobe is set up to the left of my camera at about 6ft high and the other is set up behind her, and to the left, at around 8ft height. If I didn’t have a second strobe I could have slowed down my shutter to around 1/50th of a sec and used the setting sun  “hair light”. However,  in this case I used  a shutter speed of 1/200 of a second @f4 to darken the background and leave the blue haze of the sunset. The trick is keeping your flashes set on low or they will easily blow out your subject at this low of an aperture. At least she has some new Facebook photos now!

Oh man it’s been a while since the last blog entry. Between vacations, moves and pure laziness, the blog hasn’t seen much love lately.  It’s been so long I even forgot my password to write an entry! I have a good backlog of things to write about, so I guess I will start with the oldest. This is my co-workers daughter, Riley. The last time we attempted photos of her it didn’t go well. She was a little tired and wasn’t in the mood for my camera poking around. This time she was in a fairly good mood, but has since gone mobile. When she wasn’t moving out of the range of my strobes, she was sitting with her back to the camera. This was one of the few shots I got with the help of her mother grabbing her dress to slow her down a bit. When I first took the shot I thought it would be a “throw-a-way” but I started to like it more because it really does a good job at telling a story about a time in life. She doesn’t want to stay still, so why should we have a photo of her trying to do so!

Well this is a first, back-to-back niece photos on the blog. I just got back from a weekend trip to Colorado. This first one was taken at the KU vs CU football game. I wish we would have ended up winning; never-the-less it was a GREAT game to watch. Our defense gave up some yards in the first half, but shut down the Buffaloes in the second half. We allowed nearly 200 less yards as compared to last week against Iowa St. Not bad considering this was done with several first time starters. We have the Sooners coming into town this weekend, so I hopefully the bugs will get worked out. All of the other shots are from our Sunday trip to Estes Park, Co. I’ll post a few more later. Too tired right now from the early flight!