I just rebuilt my website back in March of this year, and so there is the business of going back and rebuilding all the posts I lost from my previous site (death at the hand of Euro-hacking), which apparently, I’m not that jazzed at doing, seeing how sparse prior entries are.

But in the process of doing this, I have to go back through my old photos and it reminds me which things I previously thought were blog worthy, and thus are worthy of revisiting.

I came across these pictures of my youngest son and was struck by so many things.

1)  Don’t wait for special occasions to photograph your kids.

Anytime in the first 5 years is a special occasion.  They change every 2 seconds, and although they change significantly less quickly  after age 4 1/2, every photo is a time capsule.

For instance, here in these photos is a nice, round scar on Cole’s forehead.  I was SOOO upset when it happened. I saw the whole thing and was helpless to do a thing about it.  It was my older son’s first week of preschool, and as we ran back from the bathroom, Cole upended himself and fell so hard that he actually rolled forward AFTER hitting the ground face down.  He didn’t cry for super long, but that scar remained for months.  In these photos, it’s already 3 months old. but still visible.

2) Casual can be great.  These photos allowed him just to play and be himself, and I worked around that to get smiles.  Much more genuine that having him seated.  It really depends on age and temperament, but super young toddlers aren’t having it.  You’ve got to meet them where they live.

3) Go back and weed your photos later. You never know if you’ll remember to take any other photos in this time span of one tooth, or natural mohawk, whatever, so you keep everything initially.  But, it’s so much easier to be objective a year later.  Do I really need a bunch of out of focus photos?  Do I need 17 of the exact same, perfect photo? Having a lot of photos is great, but keeping bad ones sort of has the effect of devaluing the whole bunch.  Sort of like a Prince four-disc CD set without anyone else editing his work. I’m sure Crystal Ball has at least 8 KILLER songs on it, but I never seem to find the time to weed through 30 other songs.

I had the pleasure of doing a headshot photography session with a preschool-aged girl that I know.  And as all moms are, hers was nervous and concerned, but no need.  This kid’s a natural.  Most of the photos below are merely outtakes. Visit her entry in the Galleries page to see the slides with the best shots, but even her outtakes are great.  She’s got tons of personality and didn’t wear down, even having to ignore distractions of other kids playing at the park in Studio City where we shot.  She’s a child actress-model, and with her love of being in front of the camera, it seems to be a great match.

What a camera does, in the way of measuring light, is to give you a correct exposure.  It gives you a mathematically correct  photo.  Here’s where a photographer comes in: technically correct is not necessarily aesthetically pleasing.  Everyone has a camera, so it’s so easy and to assume that it’s better and more expensive equipment that makes the difference between an okay photo and a dazzling photo. Here is an example of why any decent photographer isn’t going to “shoot and burn”, to take a bunch of photos and turn around and hand them over with no culling, no post-processing.  Just as photographers back in the day who shot on film had to go and to develop the film and make prints a specific way, adjusting things to make a great photo, so do digital photographers.

This example was from a recent photo session for a toddler girl’s acting/modeling headshot in Studio City. It was a great day, but quite sunny, so we shot most photos under the bough of some trees.

Notice that although the first photo is adequately exposed, meaning there is enough light in it, but the QUALITY of light is the issue.  The light in the shade is slightly bluish, and the light is so soft that there is very little contrast.  Once I warmed up the color temperature, her eyes pop naturally – no enhancement necessary.  Contrast was tweaked as well. I lightened a few blemishes, but no major surgery – for children’s headshots, agents prefer or require natural looking shots of what a child actually looks like. The mole on her left cheek is a permanent feature, thus it was left alone.

For kids’ headshots, the aim is closer to really high quality snapshots than retouched portraits. Better than what you’d do on your own, but not overly “done”.

*Note: the unretouched picture on the left was shot in the RAW format, so picture is even less sharp or bright than an in camera JPEG would be, however, in camera JPEGs compress photos and lose information, so a lot of photographers shoot in RAW, which requires a little more post-processing, but ends up with higher quality photos.

When I bought a mac 5 or 6 years ago, I was astounded and disappointed to see an old and oft-used feature from Windows was missing in what was touted to be such a user friendly platform.  Undelete.  Yes, you can sift through the OS X trash can and find things you’ve deleted, but you can’t get them to pop back to their original location, which is a serious, serious pain in the butt.  Where’d it come from?  With Windows, you undelete and it just goes back to where it came from.

Searching on Mac forums to find a solution, I didn’t see one.  I saw convoluted and ridiculous (as usual) workarounds from fanboys and admonishments to not delete things period.  Wow.  Turns out, OS X only suffers from lacking PR in this area: the feature exists!

Why it’s not touted or publicized enough that people know it, I don’t know, but there is indeed a working undelete function in OS X!  Yay.

Here’s how you do it:

1) Go to the trash folder

2) Click the file(s) you deleted that you want to restore to the original location

3) Right click and select: Put back.

or if you’d like, you can Delete the file from trash and instead of it erasing the file, it pops it right back to the previous location.  So either click command+delete, or use the red delete icon (if you’ve enabled that in the finder toolbar) and it restores your file.

Screenshot: How to undelete and put back Finder Files from Mac OSX Trash to former location

Holy crap!  You mean it’s been hiding under my nose this whole time?  Apple forum apologists were defending Apple for not including a necessary feature that they actually DID include? Maybe if they’d stop being so defensive, they’d realize this feature exist and publicize it.  This solves one of my top 10 OS X peeves, and I’m thrilled.

Please share this so your Apple friends and Windows switchers know that you can restore files almost as easily as you could in Windows in OS X.

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UPDATE:

There are some caveats.

1) The delete has to have occured inside finder and not inside an application

2) The file needs to be on an indexed drive

3) There is still no way to sort trash files by useful columns such as “Date Deleted” or “Original Location”

So while it’s nice that they (re)introduced this feature with Snow Leopard, it still needs work to be as useful as it could.

I like to include outtakes in my blog.  Often, the pictures that touch me most, is the goofy, off-the-wall or just private moment captured on film.  If you’d like to see some of the best official photos from this session, you can at this link, but a lot of the ones I’m showing really capture the essence of this family, on this particular day.

This lovely family wanted to do a beach family photography session.  Not only was it a lovely, overcast day, but the beach was fairly empty. Malibu is a gorgeous beach community and a great place to hang out.  We encountered a couple of surfers and a few locals walking their dogs on the beach. The youngest boy was 5 and he wasn’t terribly interested in having his photos taken.  He was, however, interested in having a good time, so it worked out.  I photograph him having a good time, everybody’s happy. They also love candid, real life shots, so I got several good ones of the kids just being themselves and the boys playing.

These were taken shortly before the Fourth of July.  You don’t need an excuse to take photos, but if you did, there goes: a holiday. LOL.  So we did some patriotic themed stuff.

Photographs can allow you to reimagine yourself, or better, recognize your own existing beauty and strengths.  Women bustle so quickly through life that they don’t often have a chance to appreciate or explore themselves.  So boudoir photography is an avenue to explore that side of yourself so often reserved for someone else.

Here are some shots from one of my latest boudoir shots.  The woman below, who so kindly allowed me the rights to show her photos on my blog (most clients choose to keep them private, which is more than understandable), is a fabulous, younger woman.  If I had a body and sensuality like hers, I’d share it with the world too.  I’d always thought that women’s sex appeal was some sort of weak crutch.  Watching this woman spark without a man in sight, totally in control of her own body, her own sensuality, her own sex appeal was  amazing. It made me realize how powerful a woman in charge of herself is indeed. There’s not much weak about women in general.

I often suggest to women who are pre-childbearing to take photos of their body before having children.  Although the female form turns into a different something beautiful, it is just that, DIFFERENT.  Pictures are the only way to make a temporary state permanent.   And years later, it’s lovely to remember what you looked like once upon a time, while still honoring the beauty of the phase you’re currently in.

Mothers and Daughters have a super special relationship. Although some are not the mini-me’s we were expecting, they still are often mirrors, good or bad (LOL) of ourselves. But there’s always this special feeling of recognition, seeing parts of yourself in another body.

I did a shoot for this family right before the 4th of July, and I was so touched by the relationship of the mother and daughter that I thought they deserved their own special blog post and gallery. Like former mermaids, broken from a spell, touching land with their feet for the first time (I know, it’s a little much, but they really did seem quite mermaidish and magical), they danced and leaped through the air.  Here are some imperfectly perfect shots.