We don’t have very many ‘formal portraits’ of the kids. It’s not that we don’t enjoy having them and hanging them in the hallway, it’s mainly the process. You get all the necessary crap together to sustain a three-month-old while on a trip out of the house, go out in the scorching heat, get in the car, drive somewhere, back in the scorching heat, into a shopping center of some kind, and then you wait. Has anyone ever been to an affordable kid photography place that isn’t ridiculously overbooked? As if the previous hour wasn’t unpleasant enough for your baby, when you get there at precisely the time you reserved they tell you they’re running late and you’re just going to have to sit on your ass for twenty minutes. When it’s finally your turn and this teenage girl is waving a stuffed animal at your baby and making stupid noises like that’s going to stop the screaming and you’re crouched there under the glare of the studio lights, propping up the baby and trying to stay out of the frame and you start getting that pounding headache and you pray that it’s your mutant powers about to manifest and you’re going to go all Drew Barrymore and everything is going to start blowing up around you…

Well we gave up on all that garbage years ago when Ana was around nine months old. Since then I’ve taken just under ten thousand pictures, probably 99.9% of them featuring our children. They’re mostly candid shots of the kids at play, reading, running around, doing kid stuff. Just enough of them have been decent that we really haven’t considered going back to the world of ‘formal portraits’ for the kids. This decision has cost us though. I have relatives who may stop speaking to us if I don’t provide ‘formal portraits’ in a specific size to match the dozens of very similar looking pictures already hanging on their wall. The last time we sent pictures it was like, oh that’s very nice thank you for the snapshot but we’re really looking forward to the pictures you’re going to send us for The Wall.

Yeah. So… how do I take a picture that looks as if it were shot by a teenage girl in some kid portrait studio somewhere? Ideally it should actually be a good picture so that we can use it too…

I’m pretty pleased with the results, given my ghetto approach to creating a portrait studio. About half of the lighting is indirect sunlight through a big sliding door, the rest is from a 55w daylight CFL bounced off our rice paper closet panels. White sheet and gooseneck floor reflector from Ikea, daylight CFL from the internets - total cost about $45.

The best part? She was still smiling afterwards and so was I.

Categories: kids and parenting, toys