My good friend, Annie, had a baby a few weeks before Christmas, a son named Sam who looks just like his father. Sam joins big sister, Izzy, who was born only two days before Leta. Annie asked if Jon and I would be willing to take a few pictures of her kids so that she could send out a few to family and friends for the holidays. In exchange she would agree to stop showing up to our house naked. God, is that annoying.
Also, she said she would throw in a few of her hand-painted greeting cards:
Including this very special interpretation of Sweaty Goat Balls, a card I plan to give to my Granny this year on Valentine’s Day.
On the morning of the shoot Sam was very uncooperative and refused to open his eyes even after I threatened to pull his toes. That always works with Chuck. So we took photos for about a half hour and then gave up. Jon took the majority of the shots as he is the better photographer, and I did the majority of the work in Photoshop, small yet time consuming things like cloning out a stray hair that fell right in front of Izzy’s left eye in every picture. I also had to take out the large marijuana plant that they have sitting against the wall in their living room. And their statue of Hitler.
All of these photos were taken with our new camera, the Canon 5D. I haven’t written about this camera yet because I wanted to see how I liked it before I recommended it. And it’s not that our old camera, the Nikon D70, wasn’t holding up. In fact, I still think the D70 is a fabulous camera, it’s just that photography has become our favorite hobby and we had pushed the Nikon as far as it would go. Both Jon and I wanted something more powerful, and after looking at both Nikon and Canon lenses, we chose to go with the Canon body. On our recent trip to New York we took both cameras and then ended up fighting over who got to use the Canon. Jon can speak to all the technical advantages of the Canon over the Nikon, but my reaction was much more visceral. Verdict: if I could have sex with the 5D I would like that very much. Instead I may just rub it on my nude body a lot.
In addition to the camera we’ve also started shooting in RAW, a much higher quality format than JPG, and now I do most of my image editing using the Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop (Jon prefers Lightroom). This has changed photography for me completely, and I won’t ever go back to shooting in JPG format. This means that Annie can take these photos of her kids, and because each image file contains so much information she can blow them up so big that she could wallpaper her living room with just the forehead of her baby boy. Once she figures this out I have a feeling she’s going to commission us to take photos of her weimaraner’s penis. She’s so predictable that way.