Fionnuala started kindergarten today, and even though she’s been going to preschool for a couple of years, there’s no denying that her first day of real school is a landmark.

She’s been increasingly excited as the day approached, and was the first one down this morning, anxious not to be late.

I wanted to get a shot of her getting ready herself, to show both her growing independence and how little she still looks to us. That contrast between growing up and still being a so young seemed to be what today was about.

Wearing her new strawberry socks (held back for today) and sitting at the top of the stairs, this one gets close to what I was after.

I had the wrong lens on for this really (the 24-105mm f/4L). It’s pretty dark in the hall, so I had to push the ISO up and there’s still a little motion blur on her fingers. I also adjusted the exposure compensation down 1/3 of a stop – partly to get me a faster shutter speed, but mainly to show that it wasn’t bright in the hall (and play up some of that reflected light on the concrete from the bathroom window at the back). A ‘perfectly exposed’ shot here would have looked too bright to me, and I didn’t mind losing the shadow detail around her skort.

Hand-held at 1/10 sec is not recommended, but the image stabilization seems to have helped quite a bit. A fast lens (like one of the primes I normally use) would have been the better choice for a faster shutter speed, and blurred the background a little more, but we were just heading out the door. Sometimes you just have to get the shot with whatever you can.

Details: Canon 5D, AV mode, 1/10 sec, f/4.0, 47mm, ISO 1600, -1/3EV.
Aperture work: slight crop, noise reduction, manual white balance adjustment, vignette added, shadows and highlights tweaked.

It’s been a busy summer here, with lots of web work and a trip back to England. But we’ve had some time to relax a little.

Here’s Fionnuala on the fake grass in her golf attire. She hits a ball with a piece of PVC pipe into our rock-covered drop inlet. I’ve no idea how she learned about golf, but her version is pretty accurate.

I like the simplicity of this image’s composition, with strong angles, lots of the green offset with the splash of colour in the stripey socks. And the fact that she’s got her shoes on the wrong way round.

Image info:  Canon 5D, EF 50mm f/1.4, ISO 250, f/5.6, 1/50

My daughter on the way to the Pancakes on the Plaza event in Santa Fe. Happy 4th to all my US friends.

A few shots from today’s visit to the Rodeo de Santa Fe matinee.

The evenings are better for flattering light, but not so great for a five-year old who’d been playing soccer at 8am.

And I got to wear my cowboy hat, which is quite the big deal for an Englishy-Irishy guy like me.

Just had a few days in Southern California, which included some Disneyland time, as you can see from the above shot our our daughter at the end of a busy day.

As a confirmed Disney sceptic before I first went to the park last year, I’m now something of a zealous convert.

This is partly because the whole thing makes my daughter so happy, which is hard for a parent to argue with.

But it’s partly because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about running companies based on core passions and painstaking implementation, and few organizations do that as well as Disney.

I’ll expound on this later, but it brings to mind something Dr Phil McGraw has been heard to say (he’s another thing I thought I’d hate but actually came to value). He argues that bring up children requires two things: ‘You’ve got to love your kids, and have a really good plan.’

I think the same is true of businesses – large or small. The people at the top need to have a real passion for what they do or else there’ll never care enough about it or be able to pass on the required commitment and enthusiasm to their employees.

But they also need a well-thought out set of plans for who does what, why and when – which should obviously draw its inspiration from the original passion and vision.

Like I say, there’ll be a lot more from me on this sort of topic in the near future, but that’s it for now.

On Saturday my friend Ned and I got together to explore an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while. ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ I thought, ‘to help photo enthusiast parents take better photos of their kids?’

I’d bring my stuff over as if it was a shoot I was hired for, but as well as taking photos myself, I’d also help Ned with his images.

So we tried it. The rough plan was this:

• Talk through some of Ned’s photos that he’d sent me in advance to get a base level and establish what sort of help he was looking for.
• Shoot some photos – using Ned’s current camera and the two I’d brought along with me. I’d be offering a running commentary on what I was doing and why, and some pointers for Ned.
• Look at all the photos and talk through which ones worked (and why) and which didn’t.
• Have a lot of fun doing it.

It was barely a plan, but it all worked really well, with the good-natured assistance of his five-year-old daughter Alex.

Some of the help was technical – even on Portrait mode, Ned’s camera wanted to fire the flash too readily, so we moved him to Aperture Priority mode to give him more control.

But a lot more of it was thinking more about what makes a good photograph – watching the light, the background, the subject’s expression (the sort of things I talked about in this post).

We also found places in their house and yard that would be good for future portraits.

Here’s one of Ned’s shots from the session – we were both really happy with it.

I think it’s a great way to give parents some of the skills they need to take great pictures of their kids themselves. I don’t believe in pretending there’s some magic that only pro photographers can conjure to create good images, and I’m keen to share what I’ve learned.

So drop me a line if you’d like to do something similar and you’re in Santa Fe, Albuquerque or thereabouts – I’m still working out the details of how to offer this in the future as a formal alternative to my portrait sessions, but we can definitely sort something out.

Finally, here are couple that I took on the shoot, just to show that Ned wasn’t the only one doing some work.

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