My Three Daughters…Exposed

No sicko:  not that way.  In the photography way.  Well, sort of.

Funny story that does have a point, albeit in a circumventive way.  (Like that $1000 word?)  When we were getting ready to go to the hospital for Evie’s birth at 5:00 in the morning one day last month, I turned my ginormous belly toward Jack and said, “You know, we need to take that on-the-way-to-the-hospital-and-get a load of-the-size-of-that-belly-photo.  Can you please get the camera out so we can do that?”

When the other two girls were born, we’d taken that last pregnancy photo of me standing in front of our current car.  (Which, as Jack duly noted, had been a different vehicle every time:  the old Ford Explorer we bought because we thought it would be a great car for kids and all their stuff–nope; the Subie Outback that Jack bought because he was following the Bay Area trend of buying a car that professed to be sort of a cross between an SUV and a sedan–but was really just a souped-up station wagon; and our current Odyssey minivan–a vehicle which, I must admit, I swore I would never be seen dead driving but have come to love with a passion akin to my adoration of Nesquik.)

Anyway.  He got the camera, I hauled the belly out to stand by the car, and–lo and behold–no flash.  And if there was no flash at 5:00 in the morning for a simple, measly belly shot, then that meant that there would be no flash for all those first pictures of the new baby.  Yes, we had family who could and did offer their cameras, but it just wasn’t same thing as us having access to our own camera for the time we were in the hospital.

So one of the very first treks we went on after the baby was born was to the camera store to buy a digital SLR camera.  We ended up purchasing two:  a small, purse-worthy Nikon Coolpix S560 point-and-click for just quick ventures (other versions of the Coolpix were made famous by Ashton Kutcher’s commercials), and a Nikon D5000 for the inner photographer in both Jack and me.

So.  Now that the background story is done, you can understand the foreground story.  The photos.  I’ve been having a ball playing around with tuning settings and layers and masks in both Adobe Photoshop (an older version, sadly, but still quite functional) and the free and much simpler photo editing program from Google called Picasa, and these photos of the three girls are the result of my efforts to be creative and find a contemporary take on the same ol’ pics of the kids.  I think Andy Warhol would have loved Photoshop!

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