Sean M. Leahy Photography

Recently I was asked to shoot a portrait of my 4 week old niece, this was the first time I have ever done a portraiture of such a young child, so naturally I jumped at the chance (Thanks Sara!).  I had given the shoot some thought before hand and decided ahead of time that I wanted to shoot this portrait on black, all black, to provide a sharp contrast between the background and my subject (baby Kiley).  I wanted the images to draw your eye right into Kiley, and hopefully right into her eyes.

When shooting the images I was trying my best to capture Kiley’s eyes, after all there is no better connection with a child then through their eyes.  This of course is tougher than you might think with a 4 week old baby.  Apparently at that age they really don’t care about being photographed…go figure.  So with the help of my other other two nieces we tried our best to keep Kiley entertained enough to keep her eyes open and hopefully capture a smile.  I racked off about 200 frames in less than an hour and ended up with several frames that turned out well.

For this setup, I used a piece of black velvet measuring approximately 3 yards (purchased at JoAnn’s Fabric) which I draped over Kiley’s crib (which worked great as a background holder) and onto the floor.  With the velvet in place Kiley was able to lay on top of the velvet and be completely surrounded in black.  I then used a small speedlight (SB-600) on a light stand with a 30″ shoot through umbrella set primarily to camera right.  I was also positioned in a way in which to capitalize on some soft natural window light to act as my fill light to my SB-600 wireless key light.  Overall, I was able to get some pretty soft light which was perfect for this type of portrait.

Photographing a child of this age is challenging for sure, but if you hang in there you will be rewarded with a few frames of gold.  When you shoot and shoot and get nothing but crying and closed eyes you can start to get disappointed (and worried you’ll have no images to show the client) then suddenly, all of your hard work and patience is paid off by single look, a single smile and if you happen to capture that 1/60 of a second, you will have forever preserved a precious moment never to be repeated.

The elusive thalarctos maritimus has finally been captured on camera, well ok, its not all that elusive and well, its not even alive.

This image is that of the great thalarctos maritimus otherwise known as a polar bear.  This massive polar bear is located in the lobby of the Natural Resources Building on the campus of Michigan State University.  This bear was shot in 1957 at Point Borrow Alaska and donated to the University by Mt. Koepplinger of Oak Park Michigan.

The image above is a composite of two separate images.  Both images were shot at night in the lobby with one image exposed for the outdoor scene and lights, and the other for the bear itself.  Blending the two images allows the bear to look fully lit while having no lights visibly on him.  The image was then converted to gray scale to be used in a project that never made it to the big time, so here it is, in all its glory.

The image was shot with a Nikon D300 and my trusty 18-200mm VR II lens.  To get this image I shot at wide angel (18mm) and used an aperture of f22 and only varied the shutter speed to obtain the two exposures, which were 1/4 s and 1/8 s respectively.