I can’t believe its been a whole year since my nephew was born, gotta love the dr. suess theme that we kept up throughout the whole year, and how fitting that my nephew was born just days from Dr. Suess’s birthday!

What? another Gender Reveal? But of course!! This time for one of my closest friends who is expecting her first child! I’m so excited and honored that they invited me to help announce the gender of their soon to be ______? Our original plan was to do ice-cream since what pregnant momma doesn’t love ice-cream? Well we get to Partridge Creek Mall and Marble Stone Creamery had been closed!!! So we found some blue and strawberry slushees at Aunt Annies Pretzel place. And the rest is history. Hope you enjoy this neat spin on the gender reveal!!

What does lifestyle mean to me?  well to me it means candid, un poses, un prompted photography.  The photographer being a fly on the wall, capturing little moments.  I love this kind of photography, its real.  Early Sunday morning I realized while sitting with my 17 month old on the kitchen floor that this was a moment I wanted to remember, this simple moment playing with his new (Target clearance) Firetruck.  Happy.  Simple.  Anything but Stressful moment.  That’s when it started, I picked up my camera that morning and realized today was the day, I was going to capture other little moments throughout the day.  Lunchtime, naptime Story, first moments after my kids got up from nap, craft time.  Just my kids being kids.

So are you drawn to this type of photography?  Do you think it would be fun to have your very own lifestyle session?  Something Easy, Simple, and Real?  Ask me about it, I have lots of ideas and really love this sort of work, these types of sessions make great albums, don’t you want an album to document this year in your kids’ life?

You may be a photographer, or maybe you aren’t, but I would encourage you, pick up your camera, your point and shoot, your Iphone/Smart Phone.  Capture your kids, don’t worry about them ‘looking at the camera’, don’t ask them to ‘say cheese’ just take their picture.  Here are just a couple of my favorite groupings from yesterday.  If you would like to see them all head over to my personal blog.

When my sister announced that she was pregnant with her second I had this idea in the back of my mind.  I am not the first to do it, I’ve seen in pop up a few times on my latest obsession, pinterest.  So this is how my sister revealed that she was expecting her 2nd BOY!  I’m just happy I was able to help!

And I think Caleb got his love of snow from me!  I love it when he cooperates for a picture!

I first met this little guy when he was about 3 months old.  Now he is almost 6 months old and still so cute and happy.  I love it when I get to see my little clients grow and learn new milestones, like sitting at 6 months.  Thanks for coming to visit and I hope you love your portraits!

I’m so happy to be posting another session of my nephew.  There are no words for how cute he is!

I think one of the most popular questions after I did my first Christmas Tree tutorial was how do you get a silhouette using your Christmas tree as the back light.  Well hopefully this post answers your questions.  In this post I will focus more on the SLR cameras, however, you should be able to do this same thing using your point and shoots as long as you can move into manual mode.

So step 1:  put your camera in Manual – yes, full on manual - the “M”.  its really not that scary trust me.

My first suggestion is to crank up your ISO.  I put mine on 1600.   At first I shot ISO 400 but then I had to have my shutter speed to slow that I got camera shake when I handheld.  its easier to just crank up your ISO at first.  Oh and as I did before, these are SOOC images (well converted to jpeg and saved for web) because this isn’t a Photoshop Tutorial, this is a get it done in camera tutorial…  Did you notice I said “convert to jpeg” what does that mean?  Well it means I shoot in RAW, I definitely recommend it, even if you are a beginner but that’s a subject for another day!

Ok now meet my first model – Buzz Lightyear – I HIGHLY suggest using a stationary model first especially if your target model is under the age of 4!  From my experience kids under 4 don’t have much patience for you messing with the camera for much longer than 30 seconds, so practice first, then once you have your settings bribe, I mean get your child.

Ok this first shot is just showing what is NOT a silhouette   My settings were ISO 400 (notice the blur, yeah that’s cause I was hand holding)  SS: 1/30  Aperture:  f/1.8

Ok so there are 2 different silhouettes you can get, and it depends on your taste which one you like better.  Please let me know which you prefer in the comments!!   This one is keeping my aperture wide open:  ISO:  400  SS:  1/250  Ap: f/1.8

And here’s the version with the aperture closed down, with this version you can see more of the details in the tree, more ornaments and stuff:  ISO 1600  SS: 1/10 (tripod)  Ap: f/16

Ok now that I have my test subject done, I can move onto my 3.5 year old.  AND it took a lot of convincing, but we finally explained that good little boys help their moms’ out and santa is always watching after all (elf on the shelf helped a little too!)

ISO 1600 SS 1/640 AP f/1.8

ISO 1600  SS 1/10  Ap f/16

Oh and P.S.  The equipment I was using was my Canon 5D with the 85 f/1.8 lens.  Ideally I would have gotten the WHOLE tree in the background, but I’ve been having a couple problems with my 50 f/1.4 lens so I didn’t really want to mess around with that.

I really hope you enjoyed this follow up tutorial, please leave me a little love if you’ve found it helpful! 

Catching up (and still behind a little) on my Picture the Holidays project.

Day 5:  The View from here

Day 6:  Every Little Thing (Ok I admit this was taken back in February, but I just thought it was perfect!)

Day 7:  Express Yourself – a self portrait – this marks the time when Cullen FINALLY starts sleeping 12-13 hour nights and I got some wonderfully blissful sleep.

Day 8:  Reflecting on the Season

Day 9:  Its a Sign (this is mostly a placeholder, until I come across a sign that speaks to me more)

Day 10:  Twinkle Twinkle