Natural light

My favorite light to work with is natural light. I'm pretty lucky, living in the Pacific Northwest we get such awesome diffused, natural lighting. People often say to me, boy it's too bad you don't get sun, it must make it hard to take pictures. What are you talking about, these overcast skies are great for setting your exposure and nice, even lighting! I'd take overcast over straight sunshine with harsh shadowing any day. :) Or maybe because I'm just starting out it's easier (and cheaper!) to use what nature has given me then shell out money and time to learn how to use a speedlight or studio ligthing proper. ;)

These were taken while we went camping at Moran State Park and on the ferry boat coming back to the mainland.

I love how if you look into his eyes you can actually see the trees and sky reflected behind him. This was taken at dusk at the campsite. 50mm, f2.8


On the ferry boat, light streaming in from Samuel's right hand side. 105mm, f4.5


by this time, Samuel was done with me trying to get him to look at the camera. I love the bokeh in this one. 175mm, f5.3


"no more pictures mommy!" 80mm, f5.6


So there you go - natural lighting at its best in the pacific northwest.

Samuel and the seamless

I've been practicing taking pictures on the big white seamless. Here's my first attempts a few months ago. My poor son was not really a cooperative model, no matter what the pictures look like. :) Shot with my D200 using the 50mm and my 28mm-80mm lenses.

Someone pointed out to me that the background isn't actually white, it's more "bone" colored. And who the heck knew there were SO many levels of white out there!





What I learned from those is that:

use a grey card or the white background to "set" my white balance

shadows aren't necessarily a bad thing

getting an actual "white" background will make it seem whiter

get more of a differential between the background and my subject (ie more light on the background, or less light on his face) to make it really "pop"

So, we're onto me dragging Samuel back on the seamless for another go-around. Here I'm using Superior's Arctic White instead of the Savage bone white I had before.

I made the mistake of setting the WB on my camera first on the background, then adding a reflector light. It made my coloring totally orange, which I tried to adjust in CS3 but you can still tell it's a little off.


here he is without the reflector light, just natural light from the living room window


trying out the BW conversion


this picture has all the "wrong" things going for it - it's too centered, I cut off his chin, his eyes are a little soft, but I love, love, love his cheesy smile


So there you go. Obviously I still have a long way to go but I think I'm getting the hang of the whole shooting on the seamless. My husband even bought me a piece of plexiglass to put on the bottom to soothe out the whole wrinkling issue I was having as well.

Brady- 5 weeks old

This is my friend's five week old son. He was still in that awake an hour/nurse/sleep cycle so I got a few good shots of sleeping baby. I didn't get any good shots of him and his older sister together, so I think I'm going to have to work on grabbing the older kid's attention more and then posing the newborn. If I wasn't already pregnant this kid definately gave me baby fever. Did I mention the adorable sleeping?!

Shot with my D200 50mm

sleeping baby. he's propped up on the boppy (the best invention by man EVER)


baby butt! the diaper covers I use come from Andromeda's Attic if anyone is in the market for cute cloth diapers or diaper covers.

Photoshoot - Amelia

This is the little sister of a girl in Samuel's playgroup. She's almost two months old, and pretty alert for a baby! She wasn't the happiest during the photoshoot, but I managed to get some non-cranky baby pictures as well as cranky baby pictures. :)

taken with my D200, 50mm f2.2-f2.8

on my white seamless on a blanket. that blanket was pretty nifty, we just turned it to pose her towards the light and she didn't care one way or the other.


see look, a smile! or, a gas bubble. one or the other. :)


me working on my B&W conversions. This one I just did with channel mixer, I'm thinking of using an action next time.


my "artsy" attempt


this is on the black velour background. I couldn't justify spending that much more on black velvet when the velour was $10 less per yard. I think it works just as well.