Day 321 - Baby Shower and Henna Designs

I attended a baby shower for a friend's sister who's soon going to be a proud mom of twin baby girls.  I wasn't the official photographer but I had offered to bring my camera when my friend told me that she didn't have any photographer lined up for the party.   I soon turned into the official photographer, and tried to capture the moments as well as the events.

The momma-to-be is a beautiful young lady and in keeping with her Moroccan traditions, she served wonderfully aromatic teas, delicate-looking and delicious cookies, and a variety of juices.  Normally, she should have been the guest of honour, but she ended up being a wonderful hostess.  Her first-born, also a girl, was looking all pretty in a while dress, but unfortunately she was really shy of the camera.

The highlight of the evening was the henna party that my friend had organized where she had a local henna artist, Shaista, from Hennarinah (http://hennarinah.com/) come and apply henna (also known as mehendi) designs on her sister's hands as well as the guests' hands, if they so fancied.  The henna artist happened to be a young Indian girl, who I got a chance to practise my Hindi with.  Very vivacious, she explained to us how she uses all-organic materials to make the henna paste which she then applies to the hands.

I have had henna applied to my hands before, but I have to say that she took it to an entirely new level.  The henna paste, which usually has a very distinctive smell of ... well, the leaves that it's derived from, was perfumed with most probably cardamom and cloves.  It smelled wonderful as she applied it, and it felt tingly and fresh on the hands as the paste dried.  She then sprinkled beautiful glitter all over the design, and sprayed a mix of lemon juice and sugar to seal the paste in.  This helps develop the rich and dark brown colour that's characteristic of the henna.

I too got a small design done on the back of my hand, and left the paste on overnight.  I applied a bit of olive oil over it in the morning, and let it sit for a while before scraping the dried design off.  The colours gradually developed over the course of the day and while I was initially disappointed that the design on my hand looked much lighter than on another friend's hand, I noticed that the colours have developed even further.

If you're in the Montreal area and are keen on getting a temporary tattoo, look up Hennarinah (http://hennarinah.com/) and I can promise you that you won't be disappointed.  She's a fantastic artist and the designs speak volumes.

However, here's a little trivia about the deep, dark colour of henna - there's a saying in India that the colour of your henna is directly proportional to how much your mother-in-law loves you!  ;-)  So, if you are your MIL's pet, by all means, go get a henna design and show it off! :=D

Day 271 - Portrait Session - 2nd Day

These images are from Sunday. I took most of the images with ambient light coming in through my balcony door from the left of the camera with a flash side-bounced for additional light from the right - it was pretty gloomy and snowy by the time we were ready to shoot.

I used my 18 - 55 mm lens as I would have to get the family together, therefore a wider angle and the flexibility to get in tight was also required due to a lack of proper space in my make-shift studio.

I really liked the relaxed expressions on the faces when they all thought I was testing the light! ;-)  It's sometimes nice to just shoot in between posing the subjects, trying to catch them off-guard.

The littlest one had already scampered off, not wanting to be part of the photo session any longer.  He was much more at home watching my son play on his computer, than he was with us, posing for pictures.

I really love this shot! Dunno why, but I think it's mostly to do with how tight I was able to get them in, creating a feel of immense bonding.

Day 265 - 100 Days to Go! Yay!

After much deliberation, I decided I needed the rest more than I needed shots of the sunset.  And I'm really happy I didn't go out to get them because what started off as a beautiful day ended in being overcast just around the time of sunset.  So, I secretly lauded myself for prioritizing on my rest.

I coaxed my son into sitting for me again this evening, because I wanted to try cross-lighting with my flashes.  I set up one flash at 45 deg behind the subject to camera left as the rim light, and used my diffuser on the other flash that I had on camera.

Most disappointingly, my on-camera flash gave out after I'd just taken the first 3 or 4 shots.  I am not sure whether it was the batteries that caused the problem, or if it was the flash itself.  I am keeping my fingers crossed that it isn't my flash - I've been having trouble with the mechanics from day 1.  The locks on the shoe-mount are really hard to turn, and the flash just doesn't sit properly on my camera's shoe-mount either, giving me enough cause to freak out at every sudden movement of the camera.

This first image was done with the cross-lighting set up as I've mentioned earlier.  I had set it to 1/8 power and 85 mm zoom, to get a narrower beam of light.  My on-camera flash was set at 1/2 power, as this was my key light, and I had the diffuser on it as well.  Further, I bounced the flash off the ceiling.   I kept the shutter down to 1/60s to be able to get the ambient overhead light as well.  This created a hint of shoulder light on the left shoulder of the subject, but I would have like it to be more pronounced, so the separation would be clearer.

The image below was taken with only a single light set-up after one of my flashes malfunctioned.  I side-bounced the flash on the wall to the right of camera and used a white foam core board to the right of the subject (left of camera) as reflector to fill in the shadows a little bit.  It didn't do a fabulous job as the reflector was at least 6 ft away from the wall, but it was better than when I used no reflector at all.