Olivia is getting SO big and I feel like I’m starting to lag behind in getting some decent portraits of her. I had posted a few a couple of weeks ago before Amma arrived. Here are more from that session:

Tonight I had a client needing a week to recover from one heck of a back injury, so with 70 degree weather, low humidity, blue skies, and puffy clouds, we decided to take advantage of this by going to Cracker Barrel for dinner followed by a small photo shoot at the park. I overuse this park, really I do, but I LOVE it for toddlers. Liv can ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuun all she wants and it’s ok, because there are no big distractions, nothing I have to Photoshop out later, and it’s beautiful. Right now the grass is about a foot and a half tall, so thankfully she didn’t run off into it. I wouldn’t trust it right now with all I’m hearing about snakes in the area anyway.

I’m still working on the wedding that I documented last Friday, so I could only take a small break to edit some of these tonight. There is a whole series I want to make and put on a little storyboard for the house!

Sorry for the watermark, but as always, I’m trying to protect not only my work, but also Liv.

Today we ventured out to the Battlefield park to kick a ball around. Yes yes, it’s a Civil War Battlefield. Yes yes, people died there over 200 years ago. Sorry, it’s the only wide open field around where a toddler can putter around without fear of being mowed over by a bunch of teenagers spastically playing soccer. The Civil War enthusiasts will get over it. I don’t very much like shooting in the open sun like this… the light is so harsh and it was really difficult to get a decent shot outdoors today. There were no clouds to help diffuse the sunlight even up til Sunset, when usually is the best time to go out. I hope it is better tomorrow because… EW on today’s lighting conditions.

Maurice and Liv puttered around with a big pink ball on the field while I snapped away, trying to practice with my new lens before I use it on a client shoot tomorrow. It worked out really well. I’m impressed. I’m less impressed by my processing of these images though. Stupid, harsh sunlight cramping my style!

Daddy’s Reward:

Olivia’s new books came in from school today. I’ve been looking forward to the day when I could order her some books from the Scholastic flyers. I didn’t realize they actually still passed these out in schools. There’s a preschool version of it, which has board books for Olivia’s age group. We picked up two for her, including one of the mouse books to match her doll from Grandma Mandy. I’m still testing the new lens, so I have some artsy fartsy shots here where I just focused on her eyelashes and blurred the rest of the image. I’m not going to shoot with it like that all of the time, but I will admit that’s part of why I bought it!

Is it just me, or is black and white photography simply timeless and elegant?

I picked up a new lens with some of the money I earned at the end of 2009 this past week. The first one that came in was a complete dud. I would tell it to focus on something and it would revolt and focus elsewhere, very annoying! So now the second lens came in, and while I thought that I had another dud at first, it turned out that I was moving too much while trying to take the shot, hence any blurriness. It’s all calibrated to the camera now and functioning perfectly fine as far as I can tell. Here is a shot I took of Olivia with it tonight:

I mostly got the lens so that I could take more indoor shots without whipping the flash out. I also love detail shots and want to get into some nice nature photography later in the year when it warms up.