Kaori came back home yesterday sporting a new hairdo. I love it and had to get some photos.

I’m so lucky to have such a photogenic wife who doesn’t mind getting in front of my camera. I know I have about 10 minutes before she’s had enough, so I have to set everything up ahead of time and shoot quickly.

I’m not at all good at giving posing directions — it’s one aspect of photography I haven’t worked on and I’m awkward with it. Rapport with a model and being able to give clear direction is crucial though for success.

You can have great technical skills, but if you can’t put your model at ease and get them into a natural looking position, you’ll never get a good photo. The success of these photos are all down to Kaori.

layout: post title: “Turtle toys and good cops” date: 2018-01-30 author: Mark Beresford —

Louie loves his toy turtle that Rhonda and her family bought for him. They’ve been so generous with Louie. Rhonda’s two boys even went through their book collection and gave up some of their favorite books so Louie could have them. I’ll try to get some photos of story time with their books soon.

I couldn’t resist this one. Louie doesn’t much like his crib. He much prefers to be in the big bed with Mum and Dad. We’re working on sleep training but the problem is Mum is the good cop and I’m the even gooder cop. I really don’t like leaving him to cry, so I keep going in and comforting him. After numerous rounds of five-minute crying periods, I’ll take him milk and he’ll sob on my shoulder, then drink the whole bottle and fall asleep in my arms.

Yesterday lunchtime he fell asleep during the day with his feet stuck through the bars!

After taking Louie’s passport photo recently, I decided to take my own this time. I used my light meter to set up three lights, used the interval timer to take 10 images, and nailed it the first time.

We’ve been wanting some family photos for a while and today was the day. It was really hard because Louie wasn’t in a good mood for much of the day — probably teething. I just took a lot of pictures and hoped for the best.

Here are a couple, with more to follow sometime this week.

Over the Christmas Holiday we went on our first little hike with Louie. We hiked along some gentle trails, through some woodland, and around a reservoir. Louie did pretty well, but of course we had to stop for bottle feeds, magic milk feeds, and nappy changes.

Of course, Sakura came with us too.

It was a sunny, but chilly day and we ended up at the Lazy Dog for lunch where Sakura had her own plate of food.

I’ll buy a proper hiking backpack for him soon so we can start going on some longer hikes. I can’t wait.