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Thursday, July 9, 2009

Yes, I bought all of the school pictures, and I'll probably do it again

I'm a huge sucker for school pictures. I'm sure those people can see me coming a mile away and just start rubbing their hands together and thinking "Let's see, a sitting pose of the first kid, a standing pose of her, one of each of those for the second kid (I have no delusions that they can tell the girls apart), one of the two sitting together, one of the two standing together, a close-up of them together, wallets of everything, and uh, we'll just make up a few more combos as we go along. She'll buy them all, mwah ha ha!"

Yes, I buy them all. And no, it's not like we don't have any other pictures of the girls...

Oh well, here are the girls in their school pictures, on their first day of big-girl preschool. (Oh man, I just know Catherine is going to squeal on me here, so I'd better confess right now. Actually the portraits were taken on Ro and Ree's second day of big-girl preschool. It's just that I picked out these awesome, fun outfits for the first day of school. And then, when Catherine and I were dropping the girls off, we saw the notice about pictures the next day—so I dressed them in the exact same thing again the next day. Fine, now the whole world knows the truth.)

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The girls are looking a little rough in these shots, no one brushed their hair beforehand so it's a little stringy, I can tell by Ro's disheveled hair flower that she's been in a skirmish (probably, hopefully, with her sister), and the picture quality isn't that great (even before we scanned them in). But they're pretty true-to-life pictures of how the girls look about 15 minutes into any preschool day, and I love them. If the pictures had been taken an hour or two into preschool, by the way, you'd have seen the girls splattered with food, paint, mud, or water, and they'd have been minus their cute hair accessories (which would have been ripped out and discarded somewhere in the playyard). I don't even know how many hundreds of times I've picked them up from school and said "Well girls, it looks like you've been through a war, so I'm guessing you had a fun day."

* Note: By the time you read this, TubaDad and I will be on a flight to Cancun, and my folks will be a few hours into their twinsitting adventure, which started with a visit to the pediatrician's this morning since Ro has a bad cold with a sore ear. Nothing like starting out with a bang, huh? I pre-wrote this post a couple of days ago and queued it up so my mom would have something to read late tonight. Lord knows she's not going to have any time to read during the day. Please cross your fingers for my folks and send them good thoughts for nice, calm, happy, healthy three-year-olds, ok? If they email me any pictures and/or updates I'll post them...

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Oh now the little varmint is just taunting us

TubaDad got another really good picture of our nighttime visitor. This time he was lounging on our fence—perhaps waiting for his supper to be delivered?

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We're going to get one of those humane traps and relocate the little fellow. But it will have to wait until next week, because TubaDad and I are heading off on Thursday for a brief trip to Cancun. It's an adults-only resort (a work-related thing), so the girls are going to spend some quality time with my folks. I don't know who's more excited.

In the meantime, does anyone have any good naming suggestions for the varmint?

Monday, July 6, 2009

Recap: lots 'o fireworks, food, family, fun, and more food

It was a really great 4th of July. Maybe the best one yet—it even rivaled those ones we used to have when I was a kid, and that's saying a lot. My dad would set off a whole mess of completely illegal fireworks in the driveway. It was awesome. For some reason I really remember the Screaming Pete towers of fire, those cardboard whirly sparking things we'd nail to a pine tree, and the weird black pellets that would ooze into short fat sooty snakes when you lit them. One year he even made a homemade acetylene bomb with a balloon that scared the buhjeezus out of us. Ah, good times.

Anyhow, I think this year was so great because the girls were so into it. The weekend was a three-year-old's dream from start to finish.

On Friday, the whole family and some of the girls' BFFs from the early Gymboree days went to our huge neighborhood Independence Day party. We had burgers and popcorn, margaritas and beer, jumpy houses, face painting, balloon animals, an everyone-wins-a-prize tennis game, and then, at nightfall, camped out on the grass and watched the fireworks show. I'd guess Ro and Ree would have a hard time picking a fave between running on the grass with their friends, seeing the fireworks (during one huge explosion Ro said "Ooooo, dat one red, white, and blue, just yike da Texas flag!"), or staying up past MY bedtime.

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Saturday, we went to the local 4th of July parade and watched my folks and all of their friends drive around in decorated antique cars. Everyone knows the girls, so every single Ford that went by threw copious amounts of candy to them (oh so much candy!). We were dying laughing. The girls were in heaven scurrying after all that sugary stuff, and they ended up coming home with an insane three pounds each. (I actually weighed those bulging little purses. Then I took a picture of them.) My folks pulled over to the curb near the end of the parade and Ro and Ree climbed into their 1919 Ford Runabout and got to ride and wave. When we caught back up to them, the girls kept yelling "Mama, we was IN a parade!!" What a thrill. My dad had an awfully good idea for next year, by the way. He said we should let the girls collect candy for the first half of the parade, and then, when the parade cars double back, put them in the car and have them toss out all the candy for the rest of the parade. Brilliance!

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Sunday we went over to the cousins' house and let all the kiddos run around and just have fun.

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The rest of the pics are here. Nothing special, just a few quick snapshots taken with the purse camera, but enough to capture a really great holiday that we had with the girls. It'll be hard to top it next year. Hey I know, we'll just have my dad make some of those acetylene balloon bombs—it will be a 4th to remember for sure!

This ought to be easy... (TubaDad's famous last words about the seamless white background)

M3 has been wanting to take pictures of the girls with a seamless white background, so we set out a few months ago to figure out how to do it. We originally bought a white muslin backdrop and tried to make it work with a couple of strobes, but it was dang near impossible to get the background to be totally white or smooth. I read a bunch of books on lighting and saw a few articles in Popular Photography on the white background shots, but it never came together for me until I decided to Google it and found a really informative series of blog posts by Zack Arias. He explains exactly what to do with clear instructions and examples, so I just tried to follow his lead.

Like anything related to photography, we had to go procure some stuff before getting started. The key components were a roll of Savage 9-foot white paper from Amazon.com, a few sheets of Thrifty white tile board from Lowe's, and a couple of 4x8 sheets of 3/4 inch white styrofoam insulation that were split in half and taped back together with gaffer's tape to make two bifold screens. A few months ago I bought a couple of Elinchrom Style RX600 studio flash units with the EL-Skyport studio control system, and we had to pick up one more before doing this project because it really takes three strobes to get the full effect. The front strobe was modified by a Westcott 24x32 softbox with a silver interior, which makes a nice soft light.

One of the challenges was figuring out exactly how to get it all set up and optimized. We originally thought we'd try this in our family room, but it wasn't nearly big enough. I then moved out to our garage, and even then I had to set it up twice to get enough room. When Zack says this needs a 20x20 foot space, he isn't kidding - this really requires the capability to spread out. We wound up using a 16x18 foot chunk of our garage, and probably could have used even a little more. Unfortunately we can't leave it set up all the time because we park our cars in the garage, so we will have to do the setup/teardown whenever we want to shoot with the seamless white background. Now that it's been done once, I'm optimistic that the next time should be MUCH quicker.

Another big hurdle was getting the lights in balance. The background is basically overexposed, which is what makes it pure white. In our 4th of July shots the girls were standing about 6 to 8 feet in front of the backdrop, and were exposed about a stop and a half less than the backdrop. The placement of the lights, screens, and subjects are all critical factors in getting the effect to work properly.

One other factor I almost forgot to mention is the camera itself. When shooting with these studio strobes, the camera is in full manual mode. For these shots the shutter speed was 1/250 in order to sync with the strobes and the ISO was set to 200 to get the highest quality image. This just left the aperture to be adjusted, and that was set to F9 to get the depth of field M3 wanted. The strobes were then adjusted to get the proper exposure, and our Sekonic FlashMaster L-358 light meter really helped to get everything in the right ball park.

All told it was about six hours of setting up, tinkering and tuning before the photo shoot started. We'll try this again when D2 and family come for a visit later this summer, and I'm looking forward to D2 having lots of good ideas on perfecting the setup!

Here's what it all looked like:

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M3 was also dying to to try connecting the D300 directly to the laptop via USB, which is shown above. I downloaded a trial copy of Nikon Camera Control Pro 2, which allows the camera to be controlled from the laptop and also stores the images there for instant feedback. The small monitor on the camera didn't give enough feedback on the setup so we tried the software. It's a lot slower, but that may just be the old laptop and slow USB. We'll see if we decide to buy it.

Once it came time to start taking pictures of the girls, M3 and her creative instincts took over. While I was setting up the "studio" she had gathered up a bunch of props and developed some ideas about what to do with the girls. She kept them moving and changed the props (she called them "toys" to the girls) out very quickly (maybe only a minute and a half per prop). The wireless shutter release we have for the camera let her get away from the camera body so she could keep things moving. Her idea was to just get the girls in and out quickly before they got frustrated or stopped cooperating, which is really hard to do at a studio somewhere else. She also wanted "normal" photos where the girls were interacting with each other or their props without having to stand in one place and smile. She talked to them the whole time (using the camera remote so she could maintain good eye contact with the girls), asking questions, telling jokes, doing funny things, asking if they'd like to do a certain thing, and frequently reminding the girls that the last shot would be a "candy shot." This type of control, and the resulting happy girls who are comfortable and willing to play around and show their true personalities, is what got us started originally on wanting to do all of this ourselves, by the way. The actual photo shoot probably only took 8 or 10 minutes, and the lighting was set up well enough that the only real post-processing was cropping the photos and making little tweaks to exposure and compensating for the strobes that didn't fire in a few of the shots. This is what a couple of the more technically correct shots looked like straight out of the camera:

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While we had everything set up, M took a great shot of me and my tuba.
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After doing this, I broke down and ordered an EL-Skyport USB transceiver for the flash control system. It will enable us to adjust each strobe from the laptop, so tweaking the strobe levels will involve a lot less running around. It also saves the configuration and settings, which will make it easier to get set up the next time we do this.

This was a pretty big investment in time and money, but I think we've gotten some shots we wouldn't have gotten anywhere else and we'll continue to use the equipment for years. Plus, it was a fun project to figure out and we've learned a lot about lighting and exposure!

PS: M says she doesn't have on any makeup in the above photo and her wet hair is scraped into a ponytail, so please realize this photo is included for informational purposes only, and not because she has any delusions of hotness (her words).

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Happy 4th of July!

TubaDad has been assembling a whole bunch of crazy photography equipment so I can take seamless white photos. Yesterday, he worked furiously in the garage most of the day setting it all up and saying plenty of words that I hope the girls don't learn for a long time. While he was toiling away, the girls played, napped, and played some more (the new fave game is Crazy Eights), and I sewed Ro's top (to make it smaller), gathered some props I thought would be fun, and posed for innumerable test shots. I think he did a pretty good job. We still need to iron everything out, including some problems we had with intermittent strobe firing, but all in all things went well. I got some great shots of the whole setup, so in case you're curious what the heck we have in the garage (besides a raccoon), we'll write up the whole shebang and post that next.

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Happy 4th of July, may your day be full of fireworks, family, and everything that makes you grin.

PS: Folks always asks what the girls are wearing, and these outfits kind of amuse me, so here it is upfront. Ree is wearing the little dress I found at a thrift store a few months ago, and Ro is wearing a red top from Old Navy (I could only find a size 6 so I had to sew the straps up to make it smaller) and a white skirt that we got as a hand-me-down about two years ago.