Messy Food Face

This last Saturday I got to watch our baby boy by myself for most of the day.  I work while my wife stays home with the little guy, so she usually handles most of the baby 'chores' each day (feeding, napping, bathing, repeat).  He's usually finished dinner by the time I get home, so I get the last bottle of the day before putting him to bed.  So, it was nice and a lot of fun hanging out with the little guy all day, getting to take part in his daily routine and just spend some good daddy/son time.

Around lunch time, I got his food out, put him in his high chair and went about feeding him.  He's not exactly the most focused eater on the planet, so if there is anything even remotely interesting going on around the house or outside, he's looking around.  He also really likes banging his hands on the table, which makes it difficulty getting a spoon in his mouth without having it knocked out of your hand all over the place.

So, needless to say, after his meals, he's usually pretty messy.  Between grabbing food with his hands, moving his head right before food insertion and not being able to keep all of the food in his mouth, we've usually got some good cleanup to do.

But, today, rather than cleaning him up immediately, I decided to get a picture of him.  We always try to capture fun, creative, 'clean' images of him, so I thought it would be really nice and fun to have a good messy picture.  Food all over his face and smiling.  I loved the picture and think that it will be a great memory to have.

It just makes me smile every time I look at this picture.  I can hear his laugh and feel his happiness.

Let me know what you think.

T.

52/52 - Sunset Silhouette

With the hot, dry weather we've been having lately, it has made for some really nice sunsets.  Without having to worry about clouds blocking the sun or gloomy weather ruining the evening hours, we have had the opportunity to spend a lot of time out back catching the sunsets.

This time, we decided to make use of an overgrown field to try to get some nice pictures of Paige and the baby against the setting sun.

I wanted to try one picture with a blown out sky and then try to get a good silhouette picture of her playing with him.  Since it was close to his bed time, we didn't have much time to get the shot taken, so we got to work quickly.

I had Paige walk about 15 feet out into the over grown field behind her parents' house and start tossing the baby up in the air.  He loves being tossed and always starts laughing when we do it.

I had my aperture set to where I wanted it, got focus locked in, then went about changing the shutter speed to get the exposure I wanted.  It's a pretty easy process and only takes a few rotations of the shutter speed dial to get both the overexposed background or under exposed foreground.

All in all, it took us about 5 minutes from the time we walked out the door...easy peasy.

I really like the way they turned out.  The underexposed picture looks like it's slightly desaturated, and sort of monotoned, but I didn't set out to make it that way...it's just kind of the way it turned out.  I think it looks pretty cool.

Let me know what you think.

T.

51/52 - Corny Sunset

This last weekend, we were out on the west side of the far west suburbs visiting some friends.  Their back yard butts right up to the adjacent corn field.  Right now, the corn is just low enough that you can still see over it and that evening, we were treated to a really nice sunset.
So, I grabbed my camera (I was planning on taking some maternity pictures that night instead) and headed out to try to capture a good shot or two.

I snapped away for a few minutes as the sun continued to go down.  I thought about trying to do an HDR shot, but didn't like the way the multiple exposures turned out, so I figured I'd just try pulling a good image out of this one.  This was my favorite shot of the set since you could still see the detail in the corn, but could also make out some of the colors of the sunset.  The only thing that could have made it better is if I could have found an old barn to try to get in the shot as well.

We never did end up getting any maternity pictures, but at least I got one good shot out of the trip!

Let me know what you think.

T.