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Articles Tagged with: kids

Help-Portrait Charleston SC 2013

That picture says it all. Little Dereon was the first to come visit us in the atrium at MUSC Children’s Hospital on Friday for our annual Help-Portrait event that we organize there every December. She was also the last to get her photo taken! It took her a while to warm up to me, and she wanted to watch the other children with a curious eye to see what the deal was. The whole morning she was wearing a mask that covered her beautiful smile, and when she finally built up the courage to get her picture taken, she took off that mask and instantly transformed into an excited and confident little girl. I couldn’t think of a better story to explain what our Help-Portrait event at the children’s hospital means – It’s a way to make these kids and their families feel normal.

The holidays are an emotional time, and to add the struggle that these kids are going through is not easy to say the least. To give them any experience that lets them feel like regular kids is important in keeping them hopeful and strong. We’re just but one event of the hundreds of different kinds that are held every year for the hospital, but to see the happiness in Danielle’s face and the gratitude from her mom, you can see why we get so excited for this event every year:

How about little Kloeiann, who came out like a rock star? We had her and her mom design a sign for her to hold up for one of her pictures, and very awesome is quite appropriate for her 🙂

We also had a frame crafting station set up for the kids to design their own picture frame to put one of their photos in.

Thanks to Amy, Crystal, & Christina who volunteered to make this happen with me again this year. Also, thanks to the staff at MUSC Children’s hospital for letting us do this every year!

The photos are up on my gallery here, and there’s also a set on Flickr.

Coastal Carolina Fair Photo Contest 2012

I was super excited to walk into the photography/art building at the Ladson Fair Grounds this week to find that my photo above, taken for Eco Fitness in Mount Pleasant, won 1st prize in the division 1 photo contest at this year’s Coastal Carolina Fair! Two of my other photos received honorable mentions as well.

This is one of my favorite shots I made this year, which was at the Change For Change benefit art show:

This third entry was from the photo shoot I did last month for Stella Nova Salon & Spa. I’ll share more about that shoot in a future post.

While I was extremely flattered to receive these awards, the big win for my family was to see my daughter take 3rd place in the division 3 contest with this photo that she made during the recent Worldwide Photowalk:

Photo by Mackenzie Nienstedt

And she also received an honorable mention for this photo:

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Photo by Mackenzie Nienstedt

We had prepared my daughter as best we could for a loss since this was her first time entering an art competition like this. We did the same with my son Kegan, who had entered a 3-D art sculpture through his art class at school. So when she won, it was truly a fantastic moment as a parent to see her surprise. Not only that, but Kegan received a 1st place ribbon for his piece as well!

Photo by Amy Nienstedt

What a fantastic day for our family! We are so proud of our kids, and it made the rest of the night a blast as we were so happy about the contests. I left my DSLR at home for this trip, opting to hang with the family instead of hanging behind the lens. I did have my iPhone and couldn’t resist snapping some shots like this sunset using iOS 6’s new panoramic photo feature (be sure to click on it to open up a larger version):

My wife, who had been having one of “Those” days, turned it around completely at the fair. I love how happy she looks here:

Finally, I have never had a caricature done of myself before. I was walking by the caricature booth, and this pretty young artist was looking at me with puppy dog eyes. She enticed me! Well, not really, I walked over and asked her how much. I’m sure she was thrilled to have such an easy ~~target~~ subject. So without further ado, here I am as a cartoon:

Caricature from the Coastal Carolina Fair

I think everyone needs a little bit of kitsch in their life, it makes me smile. I’ve got a lot more to share with you all, so check back soon!

Help Help-Portrait 2012

First off, lets start off with some great news, the date has been set for my Help-Portrait group’s now annual visit to the MUSC children’s hospital. We will be shooting on Friday morning, December 7th 2012. The actual worldwide date for Help-Portrait is the 8th, but the hospital can’t do this on a weekend, so we’re as close as humanly possible this year! The Help-Portrait community website hasn’t quite settled on what back-end technology they are going with yet this year, so I’ll be using this Facebook page to get organized. This leads me to the next thing I wanted talk about.

Help-Portrait needs your help! We’re turning to our local communities to pitch in and help us provide portraits to the families we’re serving. Here’s the deal:

Every $10 donation provides the ability for us to provide at least 3 prints and a frame to each family we shoot. What’s better is that for each $10 donation, Wacom (the makers of the pen tablet that I use to edit photos on a daily basis) is matching each donation! So for every $10 that gets donated, Wacom will also give a $10 donation that goes to our community. In effect, your $10 just magically became $20 because of Wacom! Also, if you are donating in Charleston, SC, the money raised stays in Charleston to fund one of our events (including the one at MUSC).

Here’s the link to donate: Donate $10

I know that this is a tough time of the year to ask for a donation, with schools and boy/girl scouts both doing their annual fund raising now, but time is of the essence! This is a Groupon Grassroots Campaign and is only running to Wednesday, September 26th 2012!

So, if you’ve felt the slightest bit of warmness in your heart for the service we provide, please consider helping out. Need some more convincing? Just check out my previous wrap-up posts here and here and here, and also here.

Father’s Day 2012

Sure I’m posting this a day late, but I just wanted to share some photos here. These were all shot with my old recovered Nikon D40 which is my current back-up body, and the Nikon 55-200 VR lens. This is equipment that can be found on Craigslist or eBay relatively inexpensively, but still enables you to make great photos!

I use this camera as a family camera, for things like going to the beach or day trips – it’s very light but allows you the freedom to enjoy the moment instead of trying to perfectly capture the moment technically like you would with a more professional body. I shot these all as jpegs and did minimal processing in Lightroom as there was not much room for it in these 6MP files.

It’s not a weather sealed camera or lens, it gets it’s fair share of sea-spray and sand, but wiping it down immediately and using some common sense has kept this camera in my life for many years now. The 55-200 lens is such a fantastic performer on this camera. Check this out:

If I didn’t tell you that that was a D40 with a budget lens, not many people would assume it.

The secret to photography is simple at its core. Have an interesting subject matter, find some quality light, and the technical stuff becomes terribly easy after that. Sure, what’s an interesting subject is quite subjective, and finding quality light involves manufacturing it on many occasions. Don’t even get me started on composition! And the technical stuff constantly evolves and changes – but you still can’t trust the camera to get it right 100% of the time so you need to understand the basics of exposure, which can take years of practice to fully understand and execute in real-life situations that require split-second reaction time from you.

STOP!

The moment is more important than anything else.

This moment captures the day perfectly for me because it was a happy Father’s Day:

Shaking It Up With Haiden

This weekend was a busy weekend for me – I had three different shoots, including a birthday party for the niece of one of my dearest clients. Haiden celebrated her birthday with a “Shake It Up” theme, and I was brought on to setup a photo shoot to capture these junior celebrities 😉

My “studio” was setup on the side of a Sullivan’s Island beach house porch. I had an array of hats and accessories for the kids to dress up in. You can see in the photo above that I created the coloring for the background using colored gels on a pair of speedlight flashes. The red gelled light on the right is also making use of the infamous beer coozie snoot. I also added some graphics to the finished portraits to finish them off:

The kids were really into it. I was so impressed with how well these kids played up to the camera. The shots I made were filled with energy and it really made the time fly (even if I had to listen to the likes of Selena Gomez for two hours)!

I also shot the event to capture some of the fun for the family and friends. The weather was perfect for photography – overcast early day light! The rain gods surely held out for this little girl, as the minute the party ended, the sky opened up!

I shot this last shot of the party goers just as the rain started to fall. These kids were so awesome – they even helped me bring my gear to the car!

Happy 7th Birthday Haiden!

OPK Are Much Easier

If you read Sunday’s post about my kids’ gift to their mother for our wedding anniversary, you heard me gripe about how difficult shooting your own kids can be. While we were shooting, some of the neighborhood kids came over to play with my son (our house is the place where the neighborhood kids like to congregate – I blame the cute dogs). Bryce & Olivia took an interest in the photo gear that I was breaking down and asked what we were doing, so I showed them the finished photos of my kids. They thought it was really cool, so I asked them when their mother’s birthday was, to which they replied next week. I asked them if they wanted to make a photo collage for their mom for her birthday, and they were ecstatic over the idea! I told them to dress up nice and come back the next day and I’d take their pictures.

They were so easy and cooperative! Every direction I gave was taken without complaint. OPK (Other People’s Kids) are a joy to shoot. They even convinced my son to get into a shot with them, although he was wearing a T-Shirt and his hair was a mess – it’s still a cute shot of some awesome friends.

Now hopefully their mom doesn’t read this blog, or else her birthday surprise is ruined! Although I’m sure she got a clue when here kids asked to get all dressed up to go over to the photographer’s house down the block…

Lucky 13

Yesterday was not only a day for dying the river green in Savannah, it was also my 13th wedding anniversary. My wife Amy had to work during the afternoon (the weekends are prime time for real estate agents), so I took advantage of the time to put together this collage for her with our kids. I initially wanted to do a triptych featuring two portraits of my children and this shot that I thought up of:

The problem was that I couldn’t find a picture frame that was oriented correctly, so I went for a four photo shoot and added another shot of the kids together, which was the most difficult to shoot. Your own kids are the most challenging subjects for portraiture and I think I figured out the reason – they lose patience quicker than a kid that doesn’t know you! They know what the limits are already, and aren’t timid to straddle that line. You really get a couple of frames to get it right and then they bolt. And the chances of getting them both looking decent at the same time are like winning a triple crown – it doesn’t happen often. I begged, pleaded, and came very close to losing my cool to get them to get it right. Don’t let them forget that you already bribed them with milkshakes to do this in the first place! Note to self: Milkshakes should come after the shoot, not before.

Here’s a shot of the finished product:

The shot at the top of this article was used in my Facebook post to my wife celebrating the best part of our marriage, which is our beautiful kids. Ahh, the power of still photography – if it was a video you would have seen what goes on between the shutter clicks, like “Look it’s a bee – AHHHHHH – RUN!!!” or “He’s touching me” or “Hurry up dad, I wanna play Zelda”. Photos are so much more romantic 😉

Building

Isn’t she dramatic? Oh, the trials and tribulations of a pre-teen. Actually, most of the pictures of my daughter I took were of extremely goofy faces and the ridiculous looks she likes to give me when I use her as my test model. I happened to get a couple of in-between shots where she wasn’t ready with a smirk 😉 Here’s one with her grinning:

Of course, my son couldn’t let her take all of the glory…

So the point of these test shots was to try out my new giant softbox from Paul C. Buff, which is being powered by an AlienBees B800 monolight. I’ve been primarily a speedlight kind of guy for a long time, only renting bigger lights for special occasions. I’ve recently decided to expand my photography and some of the things I’m going to start shooting are more in the fashion, portraiture, and editorial style of work. That means proper studio lighting. Now, I’m not going to jump into a Profoto system right off the bat, and since I’ve used AlienBees in the past, I’ve decided to start with a couple of B800’s.

*Warning* Here comes a bunch of technical talk…

Here are the reasons I chose to go with this particular model: The AlienBees line has a 6 full f/stop range on their lights, so the highest power B1600 can only be stopped down to 20 Ws, while the B800 can go down to 10 Ws at 1/32nd power. I’ll rarely (if ever) need to shoot at full power on the B800 for the applications I’m intending them for, but for shooting wide open like I did in the two shots of my daughter above, I need lower power. Even with the B800 I had to lower the ISO to 100 (the native ISO on my Nikon is 200) to shoot at f/2.8. The shot of my son was at f/8, and you can see there is a lot more detail in that shot overall – it’s a totally different look. I like to have options easily available without having to throw light eating filters on my lens or lights. In this beach wedding shot taken in harsh mid-day sunlight, I had rented a B1600 and never went over half-power, so I don’t see myself needing the extra daylight-crushing power just yet.

The best choice of the Paul C. Buff line of lights for versatility is the Einstein, but since I’m trying to gradually build up, I know that the B800 will be versatile enough for almost 1/2 the price. In the future I hope to add an Einstein as my main light and then move the Bees to fill and/or accent lights, but for now I’m very happy with the range of the B800.

I also had one very important and extremely technical choice to make when getting the AlienBees lights. Which color to get? I really like the white since it’s different enough without looking goofy – I saw someone using a pink one lately and it was a bit much for my taste 😉 I didn’t want to go with black since the Einsteins are only available in black and I want to be able to quickly differentiate between the different models in the future. Telling a less knowledgeable assistant to move the white light is easier than calling out a model number!

Fog

This past weekend, my family traveled up to the border of SC and NC to do some work on the in-law’s home and to celebrate her birthday. Since her home was going to be a work zone, we opted not to sleep at my mother-in-law’s house and rented a home in Landrum, SC for the duration.

On Sunday morning, after a long weekend of peeling wallpaper, spackling, laying tile, grouting, masking, priming, and painting, I woke up to a wonderfully thick fog. I decided to throw on my sweatshirt and shoes and take a walk down the road with my camera.

Fog makes for some fantastic landscape opportunities. It’s almost too good, because it eliminates so much and allows you to focus on your subjects clearly, which is ironic because nothing is optically clear in the fog.

I guess the best word to explain what I mean is isolation. You can focus your mind’s eye on an object when everything else is out of focus and easily isolate it.

It’s kind of like nature’s bokeh. I also found it very stimulating. I hadn’t even had my morning coffee yet, but I was full of life by the time I walked to the end of the dirt road leading up to the main road. At that point, the creative juices were flowing and the most ordinary things became extraordinary.

The processing on the photos above were all done in Snapseed on the Mac. It’s a great program for making gritty photos, which adds to the mood of my early morning adventure.

After breakfast, the kids & I did some exploring on the property of the rental home. My daughter found a little guest house that was very much geared for youngsters. It had a loft with a bunch of mattresses that were screaming for kids to play on.

My son found a tree swing, which he made quick use of…

And in the garage that was converted into a workshop, I found this:

A fully equipped darkroom! It was truly awesome – the owner of this house has everything you need to develop film. He also has studio space, which was more like storage space while I was there. Regardless, I took the opportunity to shoot some of the elements, including this:

The next time I complain about the cost of a lens, I’ll look at the pictures of this setup and realize just how expensive photography used to be monetarily as well as time-wise. It makes you think about how different the developing process is now for photos. Before, you would lock yourself away in a room for hours just dodging and burning away, completely in the creative zone – much like my walk in the fog, but with chemicals! I have a lot of respect for the dedication and work that went into this craft before this industrial age of digital.

In other news, I received my new lens and I can’t wait to try it out in a few professional scenarios – so far, it’s only been used to shoot my pets, which is never a bad thing really 😉

Mutts, Music, & More

Today was the 1st 2nd Sunday on King Street for 2012 in Charleston, SC. The weather was perfect for Charleston’s monthly block party. Last time I shot one of these, I decided that I needed to focus on shooting more dogs the next time I go, so today was that next time. Let’s start off with the most interesting dog I saw today, a Toy Australian Shepherd:

Here are some other stand-outs that we saw:

There was also plenty of music courtesy of Shrimp City Slim, Sollie “Puddin” Jenkins, Michael Lindsey, and accordionist Matt Lohan (pictured at the top of this post). Here’s some shots of the musicians on King Street:

Some stores brought their wares out onto the streets…

And restaurants their food…

There were plenty of interesting people from all walks of life enjoying the unseasonably mild weather. It felt more like early fall than early winter.

We had a great Mediterranean lunch at Taziki’s Restaurant, but had to cut our trip a little short with the news that Amy’s cousin gave birth to her daughter over at MUSC. Crystal was the subject of my very first wedding shoot a couple of years ago! Here’s a shot of her with Kegan in the hospital:

Congrats to the proud parents! After we left the hospital, we stopped by my brother-in-law’s house over in James Island to check out his girlfriend’s new chicken coup. While we were there, there was one of those phenomenal Charleston sunsets, and I used my iPhone to capture this shot of the colorful sky through the trees:

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