I'm just going to say it. Overhead mid-day sunlight - not the friend of the momtographer. With the exception perhaps of the middle of the night, if you can pick any other light in which to take portraits, pick it. But that's the thing about Momtography - our job is to document our kiddos lives... and sometimes we can't help the light.  So our job is to take the big lemon in the sky and make photographic lemonade.

So why is it such a challenge?  Well, think about the light of the midday sun - it streams down directly and harshly from above. If you could even see their eyes under those squinty eyelids, they would be made dark by the shadows cast by their brow bones. And wow, the contrast just isn't' pretty… is that a nose or a sundial?

Sunflare.  It's a special kind of backlighting that happens when you put your subject inbetween the sun and your camera. It usually happens in the late afternoon (except for you odd early birds among us!), and the results range from colors that look like the lemonade of late summer, to wild lens flare, to silhouetted backlight.

The general idea is to face your camera west at sunset, and put your subject somewhere between you and the sun.

Keep the sun JUST slightly out of the frame, and here's what you get.

There are few lighting situations that I love more than the backlight blowout.

The trick is to place your kiddo with their back facing a very bright light source (such as a bright window, balcony, or the very edge of deep shade), and have a source of reflection in front of them to bounce some of the light spilling from behind them back onto their face.  My favorite is white carpet, but a white blanket, sheet, or even a reflector does the job!

Your aperture. It's soooo important. It's the ring inside of your camera that narrows and widens to determine how much light you let inside of your lens to wait at the shutter - so it's the first element of the exposure triangle. And it gives you fabulous creative control over your images IF you understand a little thing called "depth of field" and how it relates to your aperture setting.

Depth of field is the amount of your photograph that will be in focus. How narrow or wide that area of focus is will be determined by two factors. 1) The aperture setting. 2) The distance between you and the point of focus

Depth of field.  It's that crazy thing that happens when your camera selects certain things to be in focus and other things out of focus. It's a beautiful storytelling tool when you know how to use it. And when you know how to make it work for you, it can make your portraits positively POP!

So this weekend, make sure you study up on your camera's aperture setting. It's the part of your lens that determines how much light you allow in to wait at the shutter. And it's also what determines the depth of field in your pictures.

One of the great things about getting a new camera is how the learning curve has inspired me to get reacquainted with some fundamentals. I find myself playing with different situations just to see how my camera will behave - and in the process, I reinforce what I know about photography.

Tonight, I played around with light. Literally. I was drying the baby off after bath time, and noticed the light spilling from the bathroom doorway into the bedroom. I knew there was a shot there, so I placed the baby in the middle of the doorway and started hunting.

Once you understand how truly limited a digital camera is, you really understand how amazing the human eye is. Just looking at Stella from my bedroom, I could see all of her facial expressions and the details of all of the light in the bathroom but my camera couldn't. There was just too much difference between the bright light of the bathroom, and the dark of my bedroom for the camera to make out her face - even though I could see her plainly.  It's a hard concept to wrap our heads around, initially.

But once I understand where my camera is limited, I can use it to my advantage for some pretty artistic effects that one just doesn't experience in our everyday looking around.

First I expose for the background.  My settings were ISO 2000 (it was REALLY dark!) f/1.6 and shutter speed of 1/320. By exposing for the background - the brightest thing here being the chandelier - Stella becomes a void of black, or a silhouette. The trick here is first to get your exposure correct, and then wait for the silhouette that tells the story.  Here I waited for her to turn to the side so I could make our her cute little button nose.

Since I had some wiggle room in the shutter speed, I decided to slow it down and try to expose more for her face. By moving the shutter speed to 1/40, her face became recognizable, but the background light becomes extreme.  Holy incandescent blowout!

It's definitely not the prettiest light for a baby (think more moody album art, bizarro thriller or even ), and it's definitely not in focus, but it was a worthwhile experiment - one I haven't done in quite some time!

Have you seen this on facebook?  Where everyone is posting a new status of what they're thankful for every day this month?  I LOVE it!  So why don't we do this motographer style?  I'll start...

I'm so thankful for FAMILY.

A thousand words would be skimping here.  Our extended family is going through a very rough time, and this picture says it all.  I'm so grateful for my family, no matter how much we get in the way of ourselves at times.

Post your picture to your status and make sure to share it on our Facebook page!!!

I know you've seen the commercial... the new Microsoft commercial that promises to magically produce perfect group shots by offering a choice of heads from different photos.  I'm not going to say I don't think it's possible, because it is... BUT, doing it well takes a little more human finesse than I think a computer is capable of.  So until someone can prove me wrong (I'm calling gimick!!!) here's a video tutorial I did last year for my local newspaper's blog.

Last Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to have my picture taken with the 4 generations of women in my family.  When the 2-year-old was happy, we were just okay.  When the rest of us were genuinely smiling, well, the 2-year old was doing other things.  So after a quick reiview of the lcd screen, I knew I had a choice.  I could drag things out hoping for all the planets (and faces) to align, possibly turning those smiles into grimaces, or I could spend a little time fixing it later. Here's my "later".

Enjoy!

Last year for Halloween, my little one wanted to be the moon.  As in the big orbital ball in the nighttime sky.  Go ahead, Google "moon costume."  See what you come up with.  Precisely nothing that actually looks like a moon, right? So after weeks of brainstorming and days of construction, our creative two-year old was slipped into a black cat-suit, wrapped with two battery packs of led-lights and very carefully maneuvered into a giant chineese ball lantern.  She was, indeed, the moon.

It began with two cousins in a basket on the side of the road.  Four Octobers later, the tradition continues. Every year, my mom makes no bones about it - she expects cotton pictures.

As the holiday season approaches and it's time to prepare for seasonal cards and document the various occasions, something else is always in the back of my mind. Don't misinterpret what I'm about to explore, because it's not that I'm opposed to cotton pictures, or any other pre-planned shoot, I think they're gorgeous. I just find that I drag my feet a little any time I'm SUPPOSED to shoot something. (Just ask my mom, she swears I have a conspiracy to withhold holiday pictures.) Something about my personality gets just a little heartburn when it comes to manufacturing reality in a photograph. 

If we lived on a farm or if we'd just spent the weekend going cotton picking ourselves, I'd be snapping away.  But pull over to the side of the road, stick the kids in the cotton field and start clicking, and somehow I feel a little less than honest.  What's with that?  There's no harm in pretty pictures, right?

I think I'm close to figuring out what's eating me.  A couple of things actually...

First it has to do with "posing".  There's a lot of talk amongst photographers about "unposing" or avoiding the staged, Olan Mills look in modern portraits. In real life, my children never sit together in unison with perfect posture, turn to me with a tilt and smile.  And if I chased them around daily asking them to do so, when they're old enough to figure out how to exact revenge, I'd be likely to find a Nikon with playdough shoved in all of it's moving parts.

The second has to do with why I take pictures to begin with.  It's because I love everything about my children, every detail of their existence.  I take pictures because I want to remember and relive every moment - so why would I make up moments to remember?

Standing there in that cotton field, not long after standing on the side of the road stuffing two kids into matching outfits, I found myself exploring that topic in earnest. 

When I show the three-year-old where to stand and smile, will I catch the same glimmer in her eye as when I set her free to run?

When I'm just "old familiar mom" behind the camera, is it even possible to get two kids to look at me and smile in unison?  Or is it better to set the scene and let them do their own thing?

What tells the story of what I see with my heart when I look at my children?  Is it pressed perfection, or stolen glimpses of love and magic?

As the holiday season begins, these are all questions I'm asking myself as a momtographer - especially when I "set up" a shoot.  I think the conclusion I'm reaching is that there's nothing wrong with creating opportunities to take unforgettable pictures as long as we impart unforgettable memories with our children as well.  As long as magnifying the reality of what lives in my heart always trumps manufacturing reality - grandma's gonna get her cotton pictures.

What are your thoughts?  How do you approach special shoots with your most precious subjects?