Neil Danton

…Mummy depending on which version of English you speak.

This assignment was nearly 2 weeks ago, but I had to wait until post-publication before I blogged about it. Didn’t have to I suppose, but it’s the normal etiquette (and sometimes a contractual requirement).

This is the tale of Mortified-Mommy, Snot Queen, Small One (The Artist formerly known as Princess of Puke) and Soon-To-Be. Not my terminology, but that of my subject that I was assigned to shoot, for one of the “Sundays”.

Actually Mortified-Mommy is my phrase, but was inspired by her own comments after the shoot. How do I know? She blogged about The Photo Shoot and I even got a mention! I think it’s the first time I’ve ever been mentioned in print. Well, if you discount the writs, the lawsuits and the banning orders….

My subject(s) of the day were a stay-at-home mother/blogger/author and family. Family in this case are 2 gorgeous little girls and a soon-to-be husband (poor soul, 3 women in one house, he’ll be driven demented in a few years time). The story was related to post-budget financial implications on families.

I arranged the shoot for early evening and was under instruction to get a couple of pics of mummy with girls, and a couple of both parents with girls, and a specific requirement for a “letter-box”. (See, occasionally I do listen to what a picture editor says. Not often I’ll admit, but just occasionally..).

A “letter-box” is a very wide but not very high image. It usually means it’s going be used in a page banner.

Snot Queen was just adorable and I fell for Small One immediately. How could I not? The instant I met her she smiled at me. I have that effect on females. Oh OK OK so the grown-up ones normally laugh at me, still….

So here we go with the images that we started before soon-to-be husband arrived:

I think most of the images were shot with 2 white shoot-through umbrellas. That option gave me plenty of light at various distances from the camera, as they tend to spray light everywhere. Mommy might have sat still if I’d asked, but I couldn’t guarantee the little ones working under instruction from me! I didn’t want anything too staged or formal, this was not an family portrait session in a studio, so I needed some lighting flexibility to allow a little freedom of movement.

“Soon-to-be” then arrived home, and was commissioned into action immediately (he hardly had a chance to get his coat off):

And then the “letter-box” image:

That doesn’t look much like a letter-box, because I only cropped it a little bit from the bottom, but by arranging the family in that way allows (if needed) the image to be cropped like this, to fit into a banner:

Now that is what I mean by a “letter-box” image.

In the end the “letter-box” wasn’t used. The top image posted above was slightly cropped up from the bottom and was used 6-column (full-page width), above the fold as a supplement Splash (page 1). Niiiice. It’s gives you a warm fuzzy feeling when your images are used nice and large, as opposed to the times when you bust your arse to get an image, and it’s used the size of a postage stamp!

So finally, for Mortified-Mommy:

Could you send me a biscuit? I didn’t have one while I was there as I don’t normally eat them, how do you think I keep my Adonis-like figure? (That’s Adonis if he’d lived to be 95).

After all the effort you went to though, I feel guilty now.

TTFN