Bubbles!

For the last couple of weeks I've been wanting to get a picture of our little guy playing with some bubbles.  All that we could find around the house were the small bubbles that you get at someone's wedding, but I wanted the bigger bubbles that you might blow in the back yard.  So, while my wife was out running an errand, I had her pick up a bottle and bring them home.

We went downstairs to my makeshift home studio and got to work shooting.  My wife stood over the baby, blowing bubbles as fast as she could to try to get as many in the air at the same time and to give him more bubbles to play with.  While he was reaching for the bubbles, simply watching them or just sitting there, I was snapping away, trying to catch a fun expression.

With this first photo, I was really fortunate to catch him, actually looking at me, with a bubble directly in front of his right eye.  It was a really unique capture and made me smile when I first saw it.

Isaac really enjoyed playing with the bubbles.  He would reach and try to catch them, or would try to grab the ones that were already on the ground.  It was the first time that we've really blown bubbles around him, so it was a lot of fun to see how he reacted.

This time, I used a slightly different set up for my 'studio'.  I have some flooring left over from what we used in our old house, so I thought I would set some of it up for him to sit on, rather than our damaged, old, dirty wood floors.  I then hung a black sheet on the wall behind him to use as a backdrop and got to work.

If you can't tell from the photo, I shot this using a 3 light set up.  It could have just as easily been done using only 1 light, but I like the little bit of extra separation that the 2nd and 3rd lights give you from the background.

My main light is set up in a 24" softbox camera right, about 5 feet high.  The other two lights were fired bare both camera right and left, slightly behind the baby.

I adjusted the levels in Lightroom 3 and Photoshop to get the background black, then tweaked a few other things to get it looking exactly the way I wanted.

I was really happy with the way it turned out and will add more pictures as I edit the other ones as well.

Edit:

Here are a few of the other pictures that I edited.

I also put together a little collage so I could print it out in an 8x10 frame.  

Let me know what you think. 

T.