33. Tom Reese

I’m not sure I quite remember a twist like this one on our HTPYL page but we’ve been going so long at this point it’s probably happened several times; one photographer inspires another photographer inspires another photographer and so on. Come to think of it, it’s probably the main reason we are even here.

One of our dear friends, Tom Reese, was inspired by another old friend, Renee Hall and her photo of a baby in a window sill. He screen grabbed her shot and sent it to his daughter hoping she would pick up the ball and run with it. She did. They got together with the world’s most beautiful baby and made some music.

I was going to describe what happened then but, as always, it’s so difficult for me to top Tom’s words. It’s just seems silly to try. Anne saw Tom’s original post and suggested that it was worthy of sharing. Here’s what he said:

Hi Nick – Here is my ‘window seat’ photo, before and after editing. This was a very fun time with our two year old granddaughter. Putting her in the window seat produced spectacular lighting, and we got her in a good mood for the photo shoot by explaining what we were looking for. She is often quite uncooperative, but she fully understood and appreciated the objectives of this one. She was especially happy knowing that she was wearing the dress that her Mom wore at this age.

I got inspired to do this when I saw Renee Hall’s Facebook post of a child in a window seat with stuffed animals. As I often do, I took a screen shot and sent it to our daughter, Rebecca, asking her to bring some stuffed animals over when she brought Reese to our house. Rebecca is very into photo ideas like this.

I think I have told you that Rebecca always wanted a girl, and got Reese after Austin and Harrison (each child is ten years apart – 1996, 200, and 2016!). Rebecca is almost using Reese as a dress up doll to have me take photos of her in really nice dresses that she buys and sells over the internet.

I set up my camera on a tripod, and used the settings that I specified in a comment on the post in your GM page. The original is way too dark, but I don’t worry about that since LR does such a great job of bringing raw files to life during editing.

I did think of you during the shoot, since this was definitely ‘finding nice window light’ as you always suggest. We took quite a series of photos, with Rebecca coaching and Reese cooperating. Some had Reese looking at the camera, but we were mostly telling her to look at the stuffed animals like Renee Hall had in her photo.

After I loaded all these photos into LR, I organized them into ten stacks. I always do stacking first, to isolate only the best photos to work on. It is quite unusual for me to have ten stacks, since I am usually looking for only one or two good photos, but this was such an amazing photo shoot that there were so many different good expressions.

After I had processed the ten photos, I then compared them one pair at a time, like I do for selecting the top photo in each stack. After this exercise, this version rose to the top, and I fell in love with it and now see it as the clear best single photo from this shoot. I will be making a framed 8 by 12 print of this for Rebecca for Mothers Day.

Thanks for you and Anne noticing my photo. That thrill never goes away!

Thanks – Tom Reese

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