Meet Alex

Sorry for the hiatus around here – been a bit busy; this guy decided to come out on Wednesday.

Mel’s water broke at about 2am, which sucked because we were both sleeping. We called her mom to come to watch Quinn as we took a cab to the Ottawa Civic Hospital (did you know cabs are cheaper than ambulances?). Then we waited… wait wait wait. At least that’s what I did; from what I could tell Mel was contracting every five minutes and in quite a bit of pain.

Around 6am she started the pushing thing (Technical term – I’m a doctor – a doctor of love!), Alex came out at 6:17am and we haven’t slept since. No really – not since Wednesday- I’m frikkin tired.

I tried my best to show a better sense of scale with Alex than I had with Quinn. Quinn was my first son and I just stuck my camera as close to his face as the minimum focusing distance would allow. Got some great portraits out of it, but at 3lbs 4oz’s you never got a sense of how small he was.

Most of my shots of Alex were taken a bit further back, including more of his environment, though in quite a few cases I got sloppy and didn’t frame right. This shot is a good example – his right hand’s cut off – you’ll have to trust me when I say all fingers are accounted for.

I went into the delivery room simple: Canon 1DMKII SLR with the 50mm f/1.4 attached. Shot mostly wide open or down to, maybe f/2.5 or something. Shooting wide lets a lot more light come in which gets me shutter speeds I’d need to get crisp images at an ISO I can bare (on the 1D I don’t like going over ISO 800). Of course the drawback is that f/1.4 is pretty shallow when it comes to depth of field, and the chances of getting the tip of the nose in focus with no joy on the eyes is pretty high. There is, however, a simple solution to this: Take lots and lots of pictures.

If you’re interested in seeing some more of Alex’s newborn photos follow this link.

Posted on Thursday, January 21st, 2010 at 10:14 pm. Filed under: Portraits Tags: Baby, Birth, Boy, Crying RSS 2.0 feed.