Baby Portraits of Cody

If I want to have a successful portrait studio (which I do) then I have to learn to do mainstream stuff.  As much as I love my bands, and as amazing at it would be to spend my life photographing them (and getting paid for it, how awesome would THAT be?!), I gotta be able to pay the bills.  I've done the senior portrait thing, and, amazingly enough, it's fun.  The seniors I photograph are cool, and their parents obviously are too, because a lot of my work is nontraditional and they have faith in me, with my strangely colored hair and portfolio featuring zombies and musicians, to capture beautiful images of their children.  These are nearly grown-up children though, high school seniors.  They have opinions of their own and can say "hey Mom (or Dad), this chick does cool stuff, let's go to her" and Mom might listen.  Small children, infants, they're a little different.  The parents pick the photographer, and I know some parents go for traditional.

I'm not traditional, but I like kids, and would have no qualms about getting into photographing them.  Kids are hysterical.  My friend Rosa, who I've known since 8th grade (nearly 10 years now!!  Wow, I JUST realized that and feel old), has a son, Cody, who will be 7 months old in a couple days time and is freakin' adorable.  Today we hung out and I took pictures of him to practice.  Some of these are edited, some aren't.  If it has a crappy background, it obviously isn't.  I really need to splurge on a nice one instead of that paper thing I've been using for the last 2 or 3 years.

 

This kid makes the best faces, he's awesome.  I had my softbox going, which is like 5 times the size of Cody, so he was kind of in awe of it.  The backdrop was set up in kitchen as usual, but the floor is hard, so we had my down comforter under it in case he fell over.  Which he did, so having the cushioning was good foresight.  Rosa brought some of his toys, like his lion puppet, so we played with those for a bit, then I went to see what I had.  Sadly, I could not find my giant purple bunny, but it's purple and would have looked weird with his green outfit anyway.  I did find a leopard-print octopus though, which Cody LOVED.  The shot below with his feet up (sooo cute!) is when Rosa was dangling it above him, as you can see in another shot.  Then we sat him back up, took a few more pictures, and went to the Chinese buffet for lunch.