Introducing...

Introducing the arrival of Albert Tien, our newest addition to our little family! Born ten days before his due date on August 7, 2008, weighing in at 8lb 8oz and 21 3/4" long. Big brother Samuel has been a big help and we all are in love.

Complete Flickr set with better resolution pictures is here.

Albert Tien


He has daddy's dimple


wide awake


his Elvis impression


baby feet


proud big brother

More about me

If you like my blog, drop me a comment, please! I track my visitors and am highly amused at the diverse global range of visitors who come to check me out. :)

I realize that I don't talk about myself much, so I'm using this blog post to rectify that situation. I'm Alex, 31 turning 32 on saturday, and besides being a mom and a wife and a budding portrait photographer, the biggest thing going on in my life right now is being 38 weeks pregnant with our second. Yes, that is right, I am a girl (I've had a few clients be confused about that). :) Due to my rapidly approaching due date, I'm taking August - September "off" from scheduling client shoots, but I'll be scheduling shoots again probably mid-September onward. In the later fall I also plan on having a Family Portrait Package special in time for the holidays, which I'll update more about later.

In the photography realm, lst weekend I purchased the spiffy Slik Sprint Tripod since our other tripod broke in half. It's super light and very accomodating for my photography needs (which are pretty much learning about self portraits and self family portraits). I set it up to take a couple of maternity pictures of myself to document for this pregnancy. For this setup I had my backdrop with the black velour draped over it, and a ball suspended by twine from the ceiling to "focus" on while I set the self timer. Note to self: much purchase remote trigger soon.

self-portrait at 37 weeks


out, baby, out!


Samuel wanted in on the picture taking as well. the composition is a little off, but not bad for a last minute 3 year old addition :)


a recent shot of Samuel


and my husband


So that is me and my family in a nutshell. I hope you enjoyed this blogpost and always, comments are welcomed!

Busy week!

Wow, this week has been super-busy photography-wise for me, so sorry about not updating. I had photoshoots saturday, a botched one sunday, monday, wednesday, and then yesterday was sunday's reschedule. Whew! Once I look at all the pictures I'll do some blog entries about what I learned during each shoot. Next week is calmer, I only have shoots scheduled monday and thursday! When it rain, it really pours.

Part of me super-excited to have all this portfolio building under my belt, but part of me is scared that all I'm doing is taking crappy pictures that people won't be happy with! Someone on another board I'm on said that the more experience you have, the more confidence you'll take with you to your shoots. :)

And to leave you with a picture, here's something from me wrangling with Samuel for a good Father's Day picture. Again, working with the white seamless background and a semi-cooperative 3 year old.



the storyboard we ended up giving my husband as his gift (thanks Amber for the help!) She pointed me here to a storyboard template tutorial which rocks!



bigger version of the storyboard here

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.