double brother trouble

On Thursday, I finally got to meet Mr. Liam and take his picture. The last time I formally photographed his family, it was just his mom, dad, and Preston. But now, Liam has joined the party and is stealing hearts as easily as his big brother.

Originally, I was supposed to photograph Liam as a teeny, tiny newborn. But his stay in the NICU, followed by family plans on both sides, meant that I didn't get to see him until now. Sadly, he's outgrown his desire to sleep through everything and that made posing him a little bit harder. We tried to put him in a basket and he just wasn't interested; he'd rather look around.



As long as he could look at us or out the window, he was happy.





Part of the shoot was planned around an awesome photo I found on another photographer's blog. (Thanks CALIMA portraits! If you see this, we should be friends.) Kat and I went to the Honors College together and she wants to be a librarian, so how could be not pose her baby among our books?


It's no coincidence that Bright From the Start is the book under his head; he's going to be super smart.


Once Liam went to sleep, I decided to have a little fun with Preston. He was so good the entire time, climbing around to help us. You can tell he loves his baby brother. Since his brother got lots of cute pictures, he deserved some too.

In true Brenda fashion, I decided to throw caution to the wind and have Preston jump on the bed... with all of us grown-ups. I even jumped on the bed with my camera in hand to catch him in mid-air.







Earlier in the day, we tried to get Preston to sit on the books so we could get a photo of him holding Liam and he wouldn't do it. Right before I left, he decided he was going to sit on the books and read to Horton and I.

Storytime is serious business to Mr. Preston.


A few posts back, I mentioned that I wanted to get better at shooting in manual mode. With the exception of a test shot to see what the depth of field was with my lens, every single shot was in manual mode. While there were some outtakes where the settings were off, especially the focus, the majority of the shots came out wonderfully. I did have a few laughable mishaps with setting my shutter speed to sync with my flash, but it was all in good fun.

I'm not there yet but I'm certainly learning.