Noelle,
You’re 8 1/2 months and you’re so amazing. Your personality is coming out so much. Lately, we’ve been taking you to Gymboree so you can crawl around and play on all of their equipment. You love to climb and you’re fearless — you’ll tackle any obstacle.
You have a walker too that you’ve been pushing around. You were pretty slow and tipsy in the beginning but now you’re getting the hang of it. We were relaxing in the front yard the other day and you were mowing through the grass with your walker like a little linebacker.
Oh, and you’re eating like a champ. Whatever mommy and daddy eat, we let you try. Lots of veggies, fruits, and grass feed and free range meat. We just put it in front of you and let you feed yourself and you love it.
Every day at work I look forward to getting home to see you. And I love the weekends where we get to spend the most time together.
{ The Image }
This image and the alternate below were taken for our friend Meredith who custom makes the beautiful hat that Noelle is wearing, which she sent a few months ago as a gift. We’re quite thankful as it’s kept Noelle warm throughout the winter. She sells these hats online — I think the best way to get in touch with her is through her Facebook if you’re interested.
We’ve been wanting to take this image for some time now and we just got around to it. However, we still had to kind of throw it together at the last minute. We didn’t have a location, so we went to the park and walked around and did some warmup shots until we found this nice rustic scene behind a shed.
We actually got the pink balloon from a momographer who was at a previous spot in the park taking pictures of her little girl. She had extras and wanted to know if we wanted one, so we grabbed it — totally not planned. It doesn’t match the hat, which seriously irritates my OCD, but I still think the image works and is better than the image without the prop.
If I wasn’t shooting this for the hat itself, I would have changed the color of the flower on the hat in photoshop to match the balloon. But, that wouldn’t help Meredith much.
The shot is all natural light with the Canon 5D MK II and Canon 70-200 f4L IS at F4. We used a silver reflector to pop a little bit of light back in at camera left. The overall scene is beautiful and I love the tones. If I wasn’t photographing an 8 1/2 month old I would have moved the balloon to the back hand but she had a pretty tight grip on it. And she has a mean right hook, so I decided against it.
~ Dad
{ The Alternate – No Balloon }
…but still the string #vicegrip
