Finally Got “The Shot”

When it comes to wall art, I feel like certain things need to be balanced. One of the reasons there are currently no portraits on my walls is because I have favorite wall portraits of The Princess, but no coordinating prints of Sparky.

One of my favorite images of The Princess was taken when she was about 9 months old and I was experimenting with my studio lights for the first time. She was sitting up, but didn’t know how to crawl, so she wasn’t mobile yet (as a sidenote: this is the very best age for photographing babies!). I surrounded her cute little bare body with lots of white tulle and placed a long strand of pearls around her neck. At one point, Sasquatch walked into the room, and she leaned forward just a little bit with the cutest “I love my daddy” smile on her face. That was the first time I felt like I captured “the shot” with one of my own children. Of course I had to have a wall portrait created. I don’t have the file on my computer at the moment, so there’s no way to share the image in this post, but most of you probably remember the image.

The print has never made it onto my wall since we moved out of our house in Stansbury Park. After we moved from that house, we never seemed to stay in one place long enough for our walls to be decorated. Since we’ve moved here, it seemed unfair to have a “shrine” of portraits to one child, while not having any large portraits of our other daughter on the wall. So for a while, we waited for me to capture a similar image of Sparky. The image was finally captured a few months ago, but for some reason, I’ve never had the wall portrait printed. My goal is to take care of that this week. This image has been shared on the blog before, but here it is again. It’s not an exact match of The Princess’ 9 month picture, but they’ll look cute on the wall together. (It looks a bit red on here, so I think I might fix the color a bit before sending it to the lab).

While living in Stansbury Park, our breakfast nook had AMAZING light. I captured a beautiful series of images of The Princess while she was standing on our kitchen table. I printed a 16X16 wall portrait of one of my favorite closeups, and while going through boxes a few weeks ago, I unearthed it again. Since then, the challenge has been to capture a similar closeup of Sparky. This is no small feat, because Sparky absolutely refuses to look at the camera. If she’s looking in the general direction of the camera, she’s running at full steam with hands outstretched to touch the lens before I pull the camera away.

The fates smiled on me the other day – we had good light in our loft upstairs (I think I only had to set the ISO to 800 – thank goodness for a camera that performs well in low light!), and Sparky was in a particularly cooperative mood. I finally managed to capture a closeup that I like.  Hopefully Sasquatch will be willing to help me get some art up on the walls once the new prints arrive later this week.

I’m sharing this last image just because I think it’s cute. Since the intention was to create a black and white print, I used the pink blanket as a backdrop because it wouldn’t matter with a black and white image. During post processing, I decided that I loved this particular image in color. It’s so rare to capture her looking at the camera with a happy expression on her face, that I may decide to get this one printed large, too.