Featured Photos

Mama Kisses [Photos]

A little peck on the cheek from Mama and Christian is all smiles.

Back Story

These photos were actually “forgotten” until recently when I was going through photos from our Door County trip in June. Once I saw them, I knew I wanted to share them. Taken only one week after the Naperville Riverwalk portraits on his six month birthday, so it’s amazing to see how he looks now compared to back then.

Silly Face

Smile

Door County Prints

Remember I said I rediscovered these when going through photos from past Door County trips? Well, those are being edited and added to the Door County print gallery over at my online print store.

Visit Print Gallery

 

Take a look around if you visited “The Door” before or even if you haven’t and wanted to see what it’s like through my lens. And check back often – more images are being posted throughout the week.

– Kris

Autumn Sister Bay [Photo]

Sister Bay, WI on a cloudy autumn afternoon in between rain showers.

Back Story

This photo is actually a remake from a series of shots I took in Door County back in October, 2009. It was a raining just about the entire weekend, but I did manage to get a few shots in between showers.

Order Prints

 

This has been one of my favorite images in my Door County portfolio, so why did I decide to remake it? Well, here’s the original version that I published in 2009:

Sister Bay – Original Version

Your Take?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what do you think? The original – more monochromatic version – has it’s own autumn feel to it, while the remake captures more of the colorful beauty that is Door County in autumn.

Leave your comments below and let me know what you think.

– Kris

Photo: Nursery Smiles

A child’s nursery is his kingdom.

Back Story

As part of my yet-to-be-announced weekly project for capturing our son’s 2nd year, he and I spent 30 minutes playing in his nursery Sunday morning for a little playtime. Or, now that he’s one year old, should we stop calling it a nursery? (I’ll ask the wife).

More details on the new project coming this week, and if you’d like to see more photos from the shoot, check out the Nursery Playtime Shoot gallery.

View Gallery

 

– Kris

Photo: Holiday Light Blur

Taking a typical scene from a holiday tree and taking it out of focus.

Back Story

After grabbing daytime holiday photos two weeks earlier, we found ourselves back at the mall to take in some of the holiday lights in their full glory. And I managed to capture one nice, holiday light portrait…

…our son lost interest in posing for the camera. Hey, it happens.

So that’s when things turned a little creative…

Manual Focus Blur

As highlighted in the image at the top of this post, I captured a few images by switching to manual focus and intentionally blurring the holiday lights to create some nice big light circles. Certainly something you can use as a background or something else like that.

Here’s a quick before/after of the same scene both in-focus and then with manual blur:

Super easy and very fun.

Zoom Blur and Body Twist

Next, I put a little twist on things – namely, my camera.

My switching to a longer shutter speed (and dropping the ISO to compensate) I first did a zoom blur opening the shutter and then slowly zooming out while the shutter was open.

Next, I worked the opposite way and instead of zooming with the lens, I held it still and twisted the camera body for shots like this.

Ornament Reflections

Finally, the oversized and reflective globe ornaments on the tree caught my eye. So I literally went around the entire tree looking for different sizes and colors to take shots of my reflection and the scenes behind me (loosely inspired by our shoot in Millennium Park). I then cropped them square and arranged them into a 2×2 collage using Diptic on the iPad.

More Photos

If you’d like to see all the photos from this shoot, check out the Holiday Abstract Shoot gallery.

Photo: Birthday Boy

Our son checking out the remaining presents at his party.

Back Story

After successfully surviving our first year of parenthood, we were excited to host our own baby luau for our son’s first birthday party. It was a little hectic at the moment pulling everything together that during that week, and then playing “host” and making sure everyone was enjoying themselves. But in the end, everyone had a great time and our son handled everything like a champ.

From a photography standpoint, just about all of these were shot with on camera flash, bouncing light whenever I could. There were a few were I tried to bump the ISO up to 3200 on my 5DMKII and reduced noise in Lightroom, but that was only for a few shots that made it.

Also, these shots were from four different rooms during they party, each with their own lighting challenges. The was the same house (my aunt’s house) that I shot my wife’s baby shower last year – except that was during the day and we had great daylight coming in the windows. This party was at night, and I could certainly see a difference, even in the same room as last year!

Photo Gallery

If you want to see more, check out the First Birthday Party gallery in the Photo Shoots section.