The Trip, Firework and Ethan's 100 Days Old

It was a busy weekend. Bo's church (Wesleyan) organized a field trip to their Silver Lake resort on Saturday. This was the second time I went to this camp site. Last time was about 6 years ago. Time flies... 

Silver Lake is about 1 hour west of Ottawa. People usually take highway 7 going toward Perth. This was what I was told. I was quite reluctant to receive directions from a church elder since I was armed with a GPS(Garmin 265WT), but I was wrong. After we passed Perth, I started to follow Garmin. It led me through a one-lane, seasonal, dirt road. 10 minutes highway drive became 30 minutes dumpy "discovery" and I almost hit a dog. Nevertheless, it was fun and relaxing. We had potluck lunch, Bo swam and we played poker which was something I hadn't played for a long time. We left the camp site about 5:30pm.

I came home about 6:30pm, had a quick dinner and packed my Nikon 24-70 and tripod heading towards the next activity on the agenda, fireworks competition at Casino du Lac-Leamy.  

This is an annual event attracting many people from overall the city and rural areas. Traffic was jammed. Parking spot was hard to find but I managed to secure a nice spot in the park lot. Tonight's show was from Portugal (the winner of last year's competition). I am a rookie in terms of shooting fireworks. I tried my best to snap some but I wasn't really happy about any of them later. Here are 2 that I am "reluctantly" ok with. (I have a Facebook friend who is a real master of such events, Remi Laprise. Much to learn from him yet.)

One of our friends, Wei Li, who has just had a baby boy 100 days ago. There is a Chinese tradition to celebrate when a baby reaches 100 days. I was asked to be the photographer of this event. Never done baby pictures before (if I don't count my wife as one of them:-), I packed my Nikon 85mm 1.4, Nikon 24-70mm 2.4, two speedlights and a reflector.

Before today, I was reading a lot about how to take baby pictures and I downloaded many samples to my Blackberry so that I can use for reference but it didn't go as exactly what I planned. It was actually much harder and tiring job to take baby pictures than landscape and adult portraits... because babies don't care and they move ALL THE TIME !  And I have to align the shooting with their schedule. I tried use natural light plus reflector to achieve natural looking images. It ended up with 5 adult involved in this task. Father and Mother took care of the baby and be in the pictures, my wife and Wei's father were holding the reflectors. At the end, I took about 250 pictures and it was an very interesting experience. The following are some of the shots during the session (while I am keep processing others).

As per Wei's request, I was trying to take some pictures of Ethan's feet. It turned out to be most difficult task. 20 pictures later, only one turned out to be OK. This is the one ! The tasty foot. Wei, enjoy :-)

And, of  course, Bo wouldn't miss such an opportunity.

At last, thanks to those people working behind the scene.

Thanks for reading. The End.