Ten years ago today, the most awesome person I have ever known entered this world.
And I’ve had a camera stuck in her face ever since.
(Whether she’s liked it or not!)
Baby Photography: Ezra’s HOLIDAY Edition
Today’s edition of Babyyyyyy Photography: It’s Baby Ezra again – aged 7 months!
Location: University of Memphis area
Here’s the story: I saw a mobile phone photo of Ezra sitting next to his family’s Christmas tree. I knew immediately knew that we had to do a mini photo shoot to commemorate Ezra’s first Christmas. Because he is too presh. Too too presh. His parents were on the same page about the matter, and the rest, as they say, is history. We had a mini photo session in his home, which was so great because I think little ones are sometimes more at ease in familiar surroundings. Plus, Ezra’s mom and dad have great style, so shooting in their home is extra awesome.
This smile? Ezra’s reaction when his daddy came home from running an errand. Love it!
I just love seeing this little family unit interact with each other. I was showing my mother some of these photos, and she said “Ooooh, you can tell they love that baby so much. That makes me so happy.” I couldn’t agree more!
This might be my favorite shot of the whole afternoon though:
I just think this shot says it all!
Food Pornage: Simplicity
Sometimes, I get so caught up in piping fancy swirls of icing on cupcakes for aesthetic purposes, that I forget that there can be beauty in simplicity.
Bokeh Wednesday
It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Bokeh Wednesday, but here it goes:
Since I’ve had my Pentax K20D, I have really been missing the ability to do macro shots. For my Nikon D50 (my previous dSLR) and my Nikon film cameras, I have something called macro extension tubes to do close-up work. I mainly use this type of photography for my food photos, but it occasionally comes in handy in other areas as well. Essentially these extension tubes screw onto your lens, and create a distance between the film plane (or in the case of digital, the image sensor) and it causes the lens to focus more closely than normal (there is a more scientific explanation for this, but I am not well-versed in science or mathematics. Alls I know is that the tubes work!) You can stack tubes of different heights together to make your lens focus closer and closer – and it can get REAL close, folks, if you use more than one tube. I generally don’t do this because it’s just not my thang. However, macro tubes have really defined my food photography (there I go again, giving away my secrets…) I love ’em. Both my new Pentax-mount tubes and the ones I used on my Nikon bodies (which, incidentally, were designed for a whole nother lens mount called m42 which I have an adapter to make fit on Nikon, but that’s another topic for another day) are manual focus, generic tubes. They’re cheap as chips. I paid around $10 for the m42 tubes and abotu $12 for the new ones I just got for the Pentax.
I thought I should bake something to show off/test out the new tubes. I made pumpkin muffins. I even tried out my new snowflake silicone muffin “tin” (not really a tin since it’s not metal, eh?) I sprinkled some powdered sugar on top to add interest for the photo. I say the new extension tubes work pretty well! This was taken with the shortest tube attached – I told you it’ll get ridiculously close if you put on more than one. Look how close just the shortest one got us!
Of course, the more closely you focus on something, the more shallow the depth of field is going to be. That means with extension tubes, your depth of field is going to be WHOA shallow. You’d have to really close your aperture down to get much in focus. I don’t want too much in focus, so I keep my aperture pretty wide for this stuff.
So that’s it for this Bokeh Wednesday. Shallow depth of field AND pumpkin muffins? Mmmmm. Doesn’t get much better than that!