It Came From Below!

I’ve had this idea of photographing Zane outside in a bunch of flowers for quite a while now. Not sure why, just had this image in my head of Zane lying peacefully in a bed of flowers. Probably a latent memory of an Anne Geddes image.

But even I am not so cruel as to abandon the baby in a pile of flowers and get behind the camera to start shooting photos, which left a dilemma on how to pull this off. Then I remembered that the new camera has an interval shooting feature where it will, for example, take a picture every 30 seconds automatically.

There’s a huge area of flowers that have just started blooming out by the pond. They are very tall, at least three feet tall, which meant that maybe I can stay down inside the flower bed holding Zane up, all the while the camera is taking photos. I set up the camera for interval shooting, attached the tripod bracket, extended the tripod, and then attached the camera to the tripod … all one handed while bouncing baby. Then, with baby on one shoulder, it was out to the garden.

Most of the time Zane is up for anything. Walks, swinging, rolling around on the floor, he’s always ready for a new adventure. But this time it was five in the afternoon and he wasn’t really sure if today needed an unhappy hour or not. As I set up the camera/tripod on one side of the pond and then walked to the other side to find a spot in the flowers, Zane decided that this wasn’t much fun. At all.

Bounce, bounce, bounce, walk, walk, walk, coo, coo, coo … I finally got him begrudgingly settled. First off a father son portrait (blah), then a couple different angles of “baby in the flowers.” Frankly, it wasn’t working at all like I had imagined. Most likely because I didn’t factor in that I’d be posing a flexible, rubbery, wobbly baby that I really, really didn’t want to drop.

So after a few shots I gave up. Took the camera back inside and then Zane and I went for a leisurely walk.

This morning in looking over the few photos we captured I found the following. Since there’s also a shot without either of us in the picture it was pretty easy to overlay the two images and remove me. The end result doesn’t look all that convincing — he looks pasted into the image — but at least I have a story to go with it.