This is one of my favorite families and I think our 3rd or 4th photoshoot together. This time, they were back for a family portrait for their Xmas cards. Little baby D. is now a toddler and we had to catch him running, but managed to get lots of good shots. There are some particularly precious ones of him and his mom here in my portfolio. Here in front of Westlake Lake.  Here are some outtakes of the whole family, trying to get him in the mood to cooperate.

I like including outtakes.  In addition to giving people a better idea of the behind the scenes, in terms of what it takes to get a baby to participate, it’s much more documentary. Now we’re cooking, here are some of the better shots with him all settled down:

And the final Xmas card photo:

This is a boy I am extremely proud of. I find his story to be so inspirational for all those people whose pregnancies ended in terrifying premature births.  There’s also so much fear and concern that your baby will never recover from having been born earlier than planned.  Well, I can’t vouch for everyone’s experiences.  My sons were barely premature at 37 and 37 1/2 weeks and they are great.  But this young man was born at 22 1/2 weeks!  Yes, you heard it, twenty-two and a half weeks.  Babies generally aren’t considered viable until 24 weeks.  But this little fighter from Pasadena didn’t just survive, he thrived.  And now, 18 years later, he’s been accepted into Harvard University and graduated as class Valedictorian. Super smart, multi-talented and amazingly well adjusted in general, he’s a walking talking miracle. So parents of preemies, know that it can all work out. Here’s one splendid example.

This is a personal post, which I’ve sequestered off into a personal blog section. I dislike when photographers mix up their personal pictures and client work. Firstly, it makes it harder for potential clients to see what your paid work looks like and secondly, although I think my kids are the cutest in the world, everyone doesn’t want to see the bazillion photos I take of them…unless they do. And they can mozy over here.

All that said, I think I may link this back to the professional page because it highlights something that I love to do and that’s gotten lots of positive feedback: lifestyle photography. Sure it’s great to see your kid clean, gussied up, everyone smiling. But what about capturing those casual, real life moments of joy, in a way that’s higher quality and more nostalgic than a point and shoot snapshot. This is a great example of lifestyle photography – a day in the life.

As a matter of fact, while writing this, I’ve decided to create a package specifically for this, called – you guessed it – A Day in the Life.

Here’s a day in the life of my then 1 and 3 year olds. There’s this notion, I think perpetuated by those who need an excuse to pity us Angelenos rather than envy us, that we don’t have seasons. Well, not only do we have seasons (we have a full 3: summer, fall and spring), but we also have fall foliage. Yes, ladies and gents. If you are fortunate enough to live on a block (yep, block by block) that has deciduous trees, you get leaves that turn golden yellow and orange and fall to the grown. Then your mow-and-blow lawn team comes and whisk them away as if they never happened.

I took advantage -it was 3 days until the lawn guys were coming. A native Angeleno friend pseudo chastised me, asking why I don’t call them gardeners, and I told her, it’s really not that posh. Back in the midwest, gardeners were something estates had. Guys with a weed whacker and a leaf blower don’t really need that title.)
Anyway, I knew they weren’t going to be around and I discovered that I don’t own a rake! Went to a super sweet neighbor’s house and borrowed hers. Ran home, rakes all the leaves from my lawn, the sidewalk and all the neighbors’ sidewalks into a big pile and called my kids outside with the camera. They’d never experienced this and loved it. Here are some of the shots:

One of the best things about being a photographer is being able to document my children’s growth regularly.  Myles just turned 3 and I decided to take him out for a photoshoot at a lovely,  park west of San Fernando Valley, between Calabasas and Agoura Hills.  Here he is with his natural smile, not the “cheese grimace” he sometimes does.

For those of you looking to start your own wordpress blog or website,  I just thought it’d be useful to someone to hear an opinion about Elegant Themes that wasn’t an affiliate link/sponsored infomercial, nor a scathing BBB complaint review. LOL. It’s just my opinion. I am an actual user, a person with no vested interest and this is an actual review.

I was a member of Elegant Themes for 2 years. Apparently 2 years is exactly long enough for me to feel totally justified in declaring it not worth it – at least for me, and other like-minded folks. I suspected it wasn’t worth it at about 9 months into the 1st year-long subscription, but here’s the hook: you’ll always have to keep a subscription, PERPETUALLY. Because the tech support is linked to the subscription. You’ve never bought a theme, you’re renting 20 at one time. So if you need any tech support at any given time, you need a subscription. That doesn’t sound SO ominous, but what’s undeniably bad is that you can’t get theme updates at all without a subscription. And you MUST get theme updates. So the good news is that Nick Roach is diligent about updating his themes, at least in terms of the minimal: not letting them break when WordPress updates. That’s some of the only good news.

When you’re first starting out your blog, you don’t understand how often themes break with each new release of WordPress. Heck, you don’t even understand how often WordPress itself is updated. WordPress is a constantly growing, constantly evolving things, partly because it’s so dynamic and partly because there are so many hackers trying to exploit it, that they have to keep it moving. So if you 9think you can buy a theme once and that theme’s going to last the lifetime of your site, like a good washing machine or tv, it ain’t. Very quickly either a plugin used with the site will outgrow the version of WordPress that you’re on, or WordPress itself with go through a couple of iterations.

All this to say: if you think you can pay $39 for a year and jump out of the Elegant Themes loop, you’d be wrong. If you think you could even learn enough to jump out in 2 years, you’re still wrong. Consider it a permanent $39 a year outlay. Which, again, wouldn’t be so bad if the offerings were that great and I’ll tell, you they aren’t.

They are amazing looking! But they don’t always function so well (elist was sort of a nightmare) and the tech support you receive for $39 is a forum where someone may or may not answer your question. People ask the same questions over and over and over again because the forum has no truly organized FAQ to address the super-common problems people have with each theme. And so if you search, sometimes you can figure it out without posting a question. Because SO many people ask the same exact questions, which is a bad sign. If 20 people have the SAME problem with your theme for more than a year (or more – date stamps give you the key), and you’ve released updates to theme, why wasn’t that problem addressed? Because the business is a great idea and a great business – it’s a marketing, selling and designing beast! Just not a support or functionality beast. The company’s concern is to sell you on something, but not to help you too much (you need to keep coming back for renewal for the tech support).

Another thing: in order to have your question answered, you must give them the URL to your site. I’m not sure why this offends me. Maybe it’s the concern that anyone in the entire registered forum knows your url and exactly what software you’re using and which plugins. Doesn’t feel that good. Sometimes it’s useful – they need to see the site in action to diagnose a problem. But sometimes, you can ask a theoretical question that has nothing to do with your specific site and ON PRINCIPLE they’ll ask you the URL. And it’s not anyone officially connected to tech support as far as you know, because no one represents themselves as tech support. As far as you know, there are a bunch of really helpful Russian guys who have nothing better to do than to help mankind, answering tech and CSS problems. But their tech support is very much like Google’s ominous forum-lurking support. You might get an answer, you might not. Because since no one is outwardly announcing themselves as official, they can ignore a question that they don’t feel like answering. No repercussions, no chain of command, no guarantee of an answer. So at any minute, your $39 theme can turn into a dud. And if I were a hacker, it’d be worth $39 a year to have a list of sites that are obviously run by newbies, and that tell you intimate details about their site right then and there!

It’s a good learning experience, no, make that a great learning experience! i enjoyed the first year just as a way to learn about how WordPress interacts with themes, and how you can style things with CSS and what PHP is. But as soon as you’re serious about running a site, vs. learning how to build a site, you’ve already outgrown Elegant Themes and that’s it. Just stick with the normal sites like Themeforest or whatever and buy one site and commit to it. If you need another later, you buy that one site and stick with it. But to get access to 30 templates at once, but no guarantee that any one of those will serve your needs is folly. Sort of like walking into a casino and thinking you’ll get rich in Vegas because there is so much opportunity: 300 slot machines? How many people do you know who get rich in Vegas? If they are lucky, a small percentage will almost break even. It’s a greedy newbie mistake to think you can get so much for so little and to underestimate how much commitment that the ins ans outs of single theme will demand of you. If you think can bop back and forth from theme to theme, flirting with each one until you find your mate, you’re wrong. They don’t even all use the same photo sizes or methods to populate photos. So while you’ve uploaded 300 pictures at 900×320 for a theme using Nivo or a cinema width picture, when you switch to something different with a different aspect ratio, you’re sort of screwed. Your text will transfer, but you’ll have to start over with the photos, which you’ll be hesitant to toss in case you do want to return to that theme. So you’ll duplicate effort, and worse, server space by reuploading the same photos, formatted for your new theme that you’re JUST TRYING OUT!

I could very easily sing their praises and add an affiliate link, but there’s enough of that already. Thought I’d do my part in sharing my personal opinion. I’m sure there are tons of people who are just fine with their theme, and face it $39 a year is not that much. But if any of what I said about resonates with you, take it as such.

Start here for free WordPress blog templates, but mostly for education more than anything else, but you’re most likely going to have to buy a commercial theme at some point if you have a deadline to make.

Here are some links to sites that sell multiple commercial WordPress themes.

Wpzoom.com

Themeforest.net – arguably the biggest WPtheme store on earth

WPExplorer

Colorlabs

Themefuse

And read this article for things to consider when choosing a WordPress Theme: https://www.wpsquare.com/before-choosing-wordpress-theme/

They’ve got lots of good suggestions.  A very important thing to look for, in my opinion, is a dedicated support forum or help desk ticket system for your theme, hopefully manned by actual employees or the author of the theme.

Check back later – there is a maker of free themes that offers excellent support, that I adore, and used as a theme before, but I can’t remember his name right now and am not near my old computer to look it up.

Happy theme hunting!

———-

UPDATE: https://www.onedesigns.com/wordpress-themes is the free theme maker who offers great support, that I spoke of early

And I must add Mojo Themes to the commercial theme listings

Of related interest – wordpress plugin membership sites: https://www.sanfernandovalleyphotographer.com/wordpress-subs…es-part-2-wpmu/

If someone asks why their head is cut off while getting headshots, it’s a sign that they’ve never gotten headshots before!   What’s technically right and what looks good are often at odds.  Take a snapshot (I use this example a lot).  A snapshot from a point and shoot looks very different from a portrait done with an SLR.  But a snapshot is technically perfect.  Everything properly exposed (eg. bright enough), everything is in focus.  And if you’re an amateur photographer, everything is included.  The whole head, the whole body, everything there. When taking portrait, editorial decisions are made, opinions on what’s important appear and exclusions are made.  A photo with a whole subject trivializes the most important parts of the subject.  If you think somebody’s hand and their eyes are equal, not the greatest choice.  Eyes are important – they convey a sense of the soul.  Mouths are important – they let you know if someone’s happy or sad. But sometimes, something’s got to go.  In order to really focus a picture on someone’s soulful eyes, sometimes the tip of their head has got to go.

And before I go on with much more deep intellectualizations, let me shut up and show you a couple of pictures – remember, they are worth a thousand words. And right now, I’m near 250, so I’ll end with two examples of how much power cropping can have. One last verbal note:  in-camera cropping is the best if you can do it, but don’t be afraid to take a photo (at the highest resolution your camera offers) and go back later with a photo-editing program (Picasa – free, iphoto – free, Photoshop, GIMP, to name a few) and crop afterwards.  Composition can be done at any point of the process.

Here goes: