Genevieve arrives!

We’ve mentioned our friends Evan and Nicola on the blog before, here.  As we said, they were expecting their first child in early July, but Genevieve had other plans.  She arrived on Friday June 19th!  We’ve now done a couple of photo sessions with the three of them and are starting to build up a nice series of photos documenting the first few weeks of her life. The first set was just a few days after she was born and the second set was yesterday afternoon, when they were over for an early 4th of July celebration.  I’ve heard it said before that travelling with kids is quite an effort and I’m seeing that coming true with Genevieve. (Good training, I suppose, since our first child is due in early September!)

For the first set of pics, we placed a black velvet blanket underneath Genevieve, and then used a single strobe on a stand with a shoot thru umbrella to light her.  Not knowing how sensitive she might be to the bright flashes, we placed the lightstand behind her to start and used a white bed pillow to provide fill on her face.

More after the jump…

After Genevieve seemed accustomed to the flash (she’d gone back to sleep!), we brought the light around front and shot a couple using a more straight-on lighting style.  The shoot-thru umbrella really make a nice, soft light source that’s great for babies…

Main light falloff example

For the set yesterday, we used the same 3-light setup as we did for Bill’s headshot. Main flash on stand in front at camera-left through umbrella, one behind the sheet to help blow it out, and one light as a kicker to the right.

As we mentioned in Bill’s headshot post, the umbrella is a convertible style and we left the black covering on the bottom half of the umbrella.  This creates a nice gradient as the light intensity falls off down Nicola’s torso and still leaves enough light to fully and softly illuminate Genevieve, without overwhelming her.It’s subtle, but it is very useful to be able to control this light just a bit more.

This is a nifty technique that Joe McNally and Strobist have written about quite a bit recently, and it’s rapidly becoming one of our favorites!

Check out more images from both sets in the slideshow below.