90 Degrees, Here I Come

Noelle,

You’re so close to sitting up! You’re 90% there, so mom and I wanted to do a shot to show everyone. We’ll do another one when you’re doing it all on your own.

We also took a picture of you for the family Christmas cards over the weekend but mom won’t let me show anyone. After Christmas I’ll post it up.

My new favorite thing about you is every morning when you wake up and see me for the first time you smile really big. Every. Time. #makesmyday

A couple of our viewers — we won’t mention any names — seem to only like pictures that are in color and with the subject staring at the camera, so I’ve posted a few of the alternates from the shoot this morning below. But that image above is priceless to me. Your interaction with mom is so beautiful.

Love you,

Dad

{ The Picture }

I’ve been playing around a lot lately with having flash mimic natural light and have been getting good results. I built the lighting in this image by exposing for the scene so the ambient coming through the window was slightly blown out. I used the Einstein 640 in an Apollo Orb as the main light at camera right. I shot a few pictures with that setup and decided the background space surrounding the windows was too dark, which made the main light too obvious. To fix this I used an LP160 on the kitchen counter pointing at the ceiling at camera left behind Noelle to fill the room with more light. Final exposure was 1/60th at f1.8, ISO100. Typically, 1/60 on an 85mm lens is a no-no due to camera shake but I was laying on my stomach which provided a good base for holding the camera and the strobes help minimize camera shake as well so I wasn’t too worried about it. The image was processed completely in Lightroom.