Tonight is the last of the family portraits (for the time being anyway).  Lisa actually allowed me to take her picture.  This doesn’t happen very often so I should really enjoy the moment.  As with James and Abi the goal was to capture Lisa doing what she does every night, and I think I nailed it!  Lisa didn’t want an iPad when they came out, but I convinced her to try one and once she did she wouldn’t put it down.  Now she lies of the sofa and plays “games” on her iPad – for hours!  She pretends to be watching TV but really she’s playing her games, I even have to tell her when to look up when something interesting happens.

I wanted to do a black and white again, but Lisa insisted that I leave her bow on her slippers pink.  No idea why you will have to ask her.

Big game of tug-a-war tonight, three Master Chief’s against smaller weaker halo characters.  Guess who won?

So yesterday I started shooting environmental portraits of the family.  I started with James on his Xbox, and tonight we have Abi reading.  Now Abi is a very keen gymnast and is usually flipping or cartwheeling around the house/garden/sofa etc., and my immediate thought was to capture her doing her gymnastics thing.

But I walked into the family room and found her literally in this pose reading on the sofa.  I loved the pose so much I grabbed the camera and took the shot.

Of course the moment I pointed the camera in her direction she started to pose for me and I had to ask her to just pretend I wasn’t there.  After a couple of shots she stopped smiling and I got the image below.

So that’s two for two, tomorrow night is the Lisa picture – if I can just convince her to let me that is.

This evening the Halo guys decided they wanted to play connect four.  So out came the game and the competition started.

I decided today to try something different and take some environmental portraits.  Usually an environmental portrait is someone at work in their normal “environment” (or place of work), but I thought it would be interesting to photograph the family doing what they usually do.  OK I admit it, it’s not that interesting, but it’s still too cold to go outside so hang in there with me.

So I had a talk with the family and they agreed (after all sorts of threats and promises etc.), to let me take their photograph.  To give the images a different kind of look I decided to make them all black and white.

Tonight’s lucky subject is James doing what he does best – Playing XBox.

Feeling brave, Carter decided to “ride the doggy”.

I’m still looking around the house for “stuff” to shoot – it’s just too cold to go out and play – especially when I don’t get in from work until 7 at night.  Tonight I decided to pull out the macro lens and see what I could shoot close up.

I ended up cutting a kiwi fruit and getting in nice and close with a ring flash.  The hair around the edge of the fruit looks good, and the deep green of the flesh is great.  There’s a little too much flash reflection to make it perfect but I think it’s a nice shot.

Lisa said the center was almost heart shaped which I kind of see now she mentioned it.

When I got home Lisa was fighting the coffee machine (well really it was the grinder), which was not working.  So I got that working and the Halo guys jumped on to make a coffee.

As I mentioned yesterday the weather outside at the moment sucks, so until it gets better you had better start expecting images from around my house coz right now I’m not changing out of my PJs.

As I spent a fortune yesterday on a new fish tank (that was to be used for “artistic” pictures only – no fish in my house), I thought I’d better use it again.  So today I filled the tank up (again) set up my lights (again) and put the camera on a tripod (again).

This time instead of dropping slightly bruised fruit, Lisa dropped some food coloring into the tank.  You have to move pretty quickly when you do this as once the coloring is in, the water is shot and you have to change it if you want to do it again (assuming you didn’t get the shot you wanted of course).

Lisa actually had a few different colors and got quite excited with the effects she got.  So I took around 30 shots as she was dripping the coloring in and selected the one below to share.  One of the nice things about this is that every time you do it it’s different, you never get the same effect twice.

For Christmas Carter got this 1000 piece puzzle and put the last piece in tonight. To capture the moment I took this picture.