July 17, 2008

Twins


A while back, I had the chance to shoot a set of nine month old twins. They are related to my wife somehow or another...those Ukrainian families are huge. I was actually working with my wife's cousin, who is a professional painter. I help him out and put in a days work, painting houses...every now and them. One day, we were painting a house that belonged to some relatives of his, I had heard of them but had never met them. I knew that they had recently moved back to Canada and had twins.
Before long, they came home to see how the painting was progressing. I introduced myself and let them know that I was a photographer. Before leaving for the day, I made sure to put one of my fridge magnets on their fridge. It wasn't long before they called me to shoot their '9 month' photos.

They had a large house so there was room to set up my studio in the 'bonus room'. I got everything ready and we got down to business.

They were at a perfect age and developmental stage for baby portraits. They could both sit up very well on their own...but they had not yet learned to crawl. This meant that we could plop them down into position and they didn't crawl or run away...if only all children's portrait shoots would be that easy.


Well it turns out that shooting two babies at once is as tricky as you might imagine. I made the mistake of having both parent behind me on either side. This meant that the kids were often looking in different directions. A fair number of shots were wasted because they were looking all over the place.

I did manage to get some pretty good shots though. The little boy was great. I don't remember shooting such an expressive baby. In every shot, he would show me a different expression. The little girl wasn't into it as much, but she played along nicely.

I'm hoping to shoot these twins again, there were great to work with and who doesn't love twins?