New background

For Christmas this year my wife and in-laws bought me a background stand and a couple roles of background paper, among many other generous things.  I had yet to take the wrapping off of the background paper and was getting antsy to set it up and use it.  Last night, before putting our little boy down to bed, I decided to set up the stands, open the paper and try a quick photo shoot. 

So, even though our son was in his PJs, drinking his nightly bottle, I thought I could throw his pea coat and scarf on him and no one would know the difference.  So, I set up my small soft box, adjusted the light and camera to how I wanted it, put his coat and scarf on and got to work.

Unfortunately, as he was winding down for the night, he was not quite in the mood to cooperate with a photo shoot.  He is getting increasingly curious about everything, and a brand new role of paper hanging from a pole was just something new to check out.  He wanted to play with the paper, hitting it, pulling at it, almost tearing it a few times and wanted to do anything other than stand still and look at me.  We tried giving him his bottle, standing him up really quickly, yelling, cheering, whatever we could do to get his attention, but he just wanted to play with the paper.  My wife would hold him, making sure he was standing in the middle of the roll, then let go and jump out of the scene really quickly and I would try to snap off a few pictures before we completely lost him.  This happened a few times until he finally gave up, sat down and tore my paper.  Luckily, the background paper roll is 36' long, so I've got plenty of paper to spare.

I took about 25 shots, but really only got 5 shots of him even remotely looking at the camera.  The entire shoot only took about 5 minutes and he was out of his jacket and finishing off his bottle before bed.
This is the only shot that turned out pretty well.  He's half turning, looking at the camera, looking like he's going to say something.

From all of the playing that he did with the paper and the hard lighting I used, you could really see all of the crinkles in the paper that he caused.  So, in Photoshop, I took out the crinkles then added a slight pattern over the background to give it just a bit more interest.  I think it helps make a flat, somewhat boring background pop a little more.  Hopefully the pattern is muted enough that it isn't too distracting.

Either way, I was pretty happy with the way that it turned out, even though we couldn't really get him to cooperate or pay attention.  Lesson learned...don't try a photo shoot within 20 minutes of bed time...it's not going to go well!

Let me know what you think.

T.