I’ve been reading many, many baby blogs, which can be a bit intimidating in terms of seeing how much effort other moms put into taking beautiful pictures and keeping records and such. Intimidating but also inspiring. We actually managed to take some decent shots to include in a birth announcement that we sent out mostly to family. I probably wouldn’t have kicked myself into gear had I not been so enamored with the birth announcements of complete strangers on the internet. I believe she was just over a week old when we took these shots:
We took these pictures on the couch with just the early morning light coming through the windows. We somehow don’t own any plain white sheets, so I actually stole one of the window curtains to make a white backdrop. The light angle gave us some weird shadowing, since the big window is off to the left in these shots. I went to town post-processing these, but I wanted a better light solution for future glam photoshoots. And today is Dakota’s one-month birthday, so if I wanted to take monthly photos, I couldn’t delay any more in finding a solution.
Then it occurred to me that a while ago Dave had gifted me some photoshoot tripod/umbrella light thingies, when I had been complaining about how little natural light we got in the house. So I set those up and took some test shots of Loki, who happened to already be sitting in the right spot:
Not bad, not bad, though the poor guy still suffers from having too much black fur and me not being a great photographer. We decided to open the blinds and still let outside light in for the actual shots of Dakota, so I guess we’ll have to try to take all of the monthly photos at about the same time of day if we want them to look similar. Ah well. Here’s our final official photo:
I want them to look vaguely comparable from month to month, so I chose this one since I was able to crop out everything not covered by the blanket. I think we’ll have to position the tripod lights differently next time though, half of her face is kinda in shadow. Boo. Ah well. Here are a few more that I really liked:
She’s starting to smile a bit. 
