I mentioned last week how, on occasion, various members of my extended family have made appearances here. Well today I’m proud to welcome the newest member of my extended family both to the blog and to the world. Meet my nephew Samuel James Kehoe, photographed last Friday when he was just about 50 hours old.
Samuel arrived bang on schedule on Wednesday evening, and once I got the phone call from my sister Orla telling me the good news I was already thinking about when I could next get to Cork to see him and, unsurprisingly, about how I could photograph him.
I knew I would use my 50mm f/1.8 lens for a start. This was for two reasons. Firstly, it is a fast lens, which would allow me shoot handheld without a flash in lower light levels, and you don’t want to fire a flash at a 2 day old baby. Also as it has that nice wide aperture it has a really nice shallow depth of field, which is perfect for baby photography.
Admittedly that fixed focal length lens would not allow me to zoom in for tighter crops on his face or his feet, but I could use the old fashioned approach and move my camera closer (or further away) so that was no restriction.
Depending on what the background was like (bearing in mind I was going to be photographing him in his own home and not in a studio setting), the 50mm lens would also help with the nice bokeh that it creates with that f/1.8 aperture – you remember what bokeh is, right?
As it turned out, the background for many of my shots was easy to handle. As our “welcome to the world” gift we bought a baby bean bag for Samuel and that proved ideal for placing him on for the photograph above. In fact, if I was to get into the business of baby photography that beanbag would be on my wishlist of equipment. The “please look after me” label adds a nice visual element, and the pattern of the material is pleasing to the eye without being distracting.
In post processing I did a monochrome conversion first by mixing the various red, green and blue channels in Aperture, and then added a 40% sepia tone to warm up the image. Finally I added a vignette to darken the corners.
As the model for the photos Samuel played a blinder and threw out a constant stream of cuteness – something he does very well.
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