A couple of weekends ago mom and dad came up to visit as a likely last visit together before our baby arrives. The plan was that on Saturday dad and I would go fishing at the Forestry Farm in the morning then mom, Angie and Angie's family would join us for a picnic. After our lunch I was planning to set up a few lights and make some nice photos of our family in which to decorate our baby's room with. Unfortunately, the weather would let us have no part of it and we had a week of rain before my parents arrived, and then a dreary day on the Saturday we planned all of this for. At least we were able to take mom and dad out to the Berry Barn for a nice supper.
It wasn't terribly rainy that Saturday but I had been through the park the day before and the puddles in the picnic area must've been three inches deep. There was no way that they were going to drain by the time we wanted to have lunch there the next day. Because of this I did the best I could with the tools of my disposal and made the photo of my parents you see above. I just needed a portion of our living room to complete the job. We will need to be proactive about completing the other photos but at least those other family members live in the city.
Though I am not at liberty to share them, yet, we had our maternity/family photos done last week and, from what we have seen of the preview, are very happy with them. It helps that we knew our photographer quite well, are confident in her style and easy-going nature and that all of us involved were pretty laid back about the process. She has an immeasurably greater amount of experience working with people than I do so I was taking mental notes the whole time. She also offered me the opportunity to shadow her on some of her shoots in the future, which I intend to capitalize upon because observing a professional work like that is invaluable experience and education.
Here's one BTS shot from the session:
Love that tree (from 2012):
From here on down is just camera talk. If you're interested in me and what I'm interested in you will probably want to keep reading. If you only came for the photos you won't miss much if you stop reading right here.
On a different note, it was 3 1/2 years ago that I bought my D700. The model was a few years old at that time and has been a fine camera. It was replaced two years ago by its big brother, the D800, which was actually in a higher category than the D700, was a hugely popular camera with image quality rivaling cameras 10-20 times its cost. The announcement was made last week to replace it with some significant and some less significant improvements and upgrades. I've been saving my pennies, balancing the budget, and have decided to move forward with this new body, the D810.
Normally I'm not an early adopter of technology. I like the things to come out, the problems be found and fixed, then I'm ready to buy in if it's the right technology for me. Because this is not a complete overhaul, but some additions and improvements, I feel confident that it is not going to be something that needs the bugs worked out. Some of the newer technology, that had me pull back, I learned has been implemented by other companies with smaller systems. Nikon has simply scaled it up for this body. It's not that there isn't room for problems but I feel that Nikon will look after their customers, especially after some widespread problems with a previous body. It took a bit of yelling by the customers but Nikon came through. I don't think it should have taken them as long to fix the problem as it did, but I believe they learned their lesson.
Hopefully it's here in time to begin the recording of priceless memories as soon as they begin with the arrival of our baby. I'm sure she won't mind a small mortgage of her education fund in the short term for dad to have a new toy/tool to preserve the memories of her growth. :-)
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