When Photographers Party…

I got together earlier this summer with some Connecticut photographers and there was much shooting of one another’s children, as children will often be more compliant for a stranger than for their own mother. This is why your babysitter gets your kids to sleep with no fussing and they demand 5 cups of water, 2 stories, a monster search and 3,489 kisses from you. I shot with film the whole day, and one of these days I’ll manage to get that post written where I talk about WHY I like film so much.

Girl with Parasol

Ian and Natalya’s Wedding

When you are related to a photographer you run the risk that she’ll bring the weird camera when she comes to your wedding. It’s a horrible burden but I think Ian and Natalya, both brilliant intellectuals with a penchant for the artistic flair, bear it well. Congratulations on your beautiful wedding and best wishes for a happy and interesting life!

Holga wedding images and portraits are not for everyone but if this kind of special imagery appeals to you let me know!

Meg: Nursing Mother

I asked Meg to be one of my “nursing on film” models this summer; I had a hunch she’d be interested as I met her at the La Leche League conference in April where she was coordinating the exhibit hall. She met me at Westmoor Park, one of the treasures here in West Hartford, and she and her daughter nursed here, there and everywhere.

Tell me about your daughter.
The sweetest girl! She is everything I have been told about myself as a child, my mini-me. Boy, am I in trouble!

Less than half women are still breastfeeding at 6 months and the number drops under 20% at a year. Why did you decide to keep going? To what do you attribute your success when so many other women struggle with breastfeeding?
I didn’t really decide, its hard to believe she is 2 1/2, already. Not sure when that happened, LOL. I was determined, when things were rough I sought support from my doula, LLL, and my mom. It was so important to me that she was breastfed, that was my driving force. When she latched on and was suckling, in the early days, she was happy and at peace, it made the whole process worth it!

Why did you decide to become a La Leche League leader?
I attended LLL meeting with my mom as a young child. I thought about going to meetings and being a LLL Leader long before I ever had a child. I want every woman to be able to experience breastfeeding and know how important and wonderful it is!

What is the best part of motherhood?
Watching your child grow and learn, and become a little person. Everyday is something new. It’s amazing!

What do you think is the most challenging part?
The most challenging part, is having enough time and money! Having to be a working mother, I sometimes feel guilty but breastfeeding allows us to have a bonding time and spend time “just us”.

What does your daughter say and do that makes you melt?
WHOA! There is so much! When she says “I wube you” (I love you) that’s the best!

What makes you nuts?
The total defiance! When she doesn’t want to listen, she doesn’t…oh and probably when she response “NO WAY!” that could make me crazy!

What advice do you have from the trenches of motherhood?
Just go with it! Don’t worry about the right way/wrong way to mother. Just nurse and be happy! We are so stressed by everything, and the time line of mother-baby is so short and goes by so fast, don’t waste it being worried about everything! Take a deep breath and jump in!

Thanks, Meg!
Thank you so much, Stacie!

Taking Better Snapshots

OK, so you bought the DSLR. It’s big. But you are still getting the underexposed pictures at the beach where your kid looks like she’s standing in a deep dark shadow while the ocean looks bright and beautiful behind her. This is starting to annoy you. What to do?

Taking Better Snapshots:  Part 1:  Learn to Shoot in Manual

Part 1: Take the camera off auto, put it in manual and learn to read the in-camera meter (or buy a separate meter or get very very good at eyeballing it).   Otherwise, you have a very expensive point and shoot.

When you look in the view finder you’ll see a grid thus:

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The one in the middle is “correct” exposure, but for close ups of pale skin you actually want the slider a bit towards overexposure because some people are just whiter than the percentage of grey that the camera uses to determine “right”.

Part 2: Once you are in Manual get a stuffed animal or an apple or anything less mobile and more patient than a child and start taking lots of pictures, changing the ISO, f-stop and shutter speed settings for each one to see how the triangle of exposure changes the final picture.

ISO is how fast the film will record the picture. The higher the number, the faster the film. The lower the number, the crisper the picture will look.

F-stop is how wide your aperture is.  The wider the aperture, the smaller the number.  f/1.8 is a wider aperture than f/5.6.  The wider the aperture the more light will be let in, the shallower the in focus area will be, and the more the background will be out of focus.  It’s hard to nail your focus with anything smaller than 4.0 until you practice rather a lot.

Shutter speed is how long the camera lets in light. My hand is too shaky to handle anything below 1/125 th of a second.  The loose rule of thumb is take the size of your lens (say, 50mm), double it (to 100) and make sure your shutter speed has that number as the lowest denominator (1/100).

Part 3: Practice with your kids on an easy lighting day.  What’s easy?  Overcast.  When the sun is behind the clouds you won’t have to worry about shadows in their faces, bright sun patches behind them or backlighting.

World Breastfeeding Week Poster

And VOILA. Having harassed asked people to tell me which were their favorite of my breastfeeding images I present the finished poster. I’ll be doing a final proofreading tomorrow to avoid embarrassing typos.

How embarrassing? I brought a stack of free postcards to the La Leche League conference in April touting the wonders of breasfeeding. I’d like to avoid that this time.

SO I’ll be doing a final proofread then send the file out to the printer. I’ll be giving them out to local breastfeeding professionals. You can order a personal copy as long as my extras hold out.

Downloadable PDF:
Please note that this is made freely available for you to print and distribute at will and am trusting in the basic goodness of people to use it as intended. Please respect that I retain copyright to these images and do not use them individually on your web site or in your materials even for the very best of causes. If you make the download available on your on web site please do it by linking back to this, original, post.

This file is very large so that you can make a very good print – you should be able to send this to a professional printer if you desire and have no issues with resolution, or just print it on the laser printer!