Week 8: A Major Accomplishment

Meet Jonah's Potty.

It's been a big week in our house and in the world of our two year old! Jonah officially used the potty for the first time this week and has done so on multiple occasions. I'll spare you the details, but he's doing a good job. We still have a ways to go, but we are celebrating the big step forward. Jonah's pretty proud of himself and we're pretty proud of him, too.

I decided that this was a big enough accomplishment in the life of a two year old toddler (and his parents' for that matter) that it was worth documenting - to some extent!

Without going into the details of Jonah's accomplishment, I'm not sure what to add to the above, so I'd like to share my excitement about the above photo. I've been working on learning light for awhile now and have been making progress but felt like I was up against some sort of ceiling. So, for my birthday this year, I asked to attend a lighting workshop here in NYC that took place this past weekend. After two fourteen hour days, I feel like I've broken through that ceiling and a lot of things that I've been circling around for awhile now clicked into place.

Granted, the photo above is no Pulitzer Prize winner, but I had an image in my mind and was able to accomplish it - quickly. I thought I knew what to do - I set it up, took a shot and it was wrong. Sigh. However, this time I instantly knew what went wrong and how to fix it! I changed light modifiers, roped Kristi into substituting for a piece of gear that I don't yet own (boom arm), set it up and voila! So very satisfying. . .

So, the photo - this is my 50mm at f/8. The light is coming from a 28" softbox directly above the potty, tilted slightly toward the camera and in VERY close. It's just out of the frame. Still a lesson to learn, though. I should have put a black card off to camera left to eat the spilled light. You can see the reflection of the baseboard in the side of the potty on that side.