MichaelandChrissy.com

Chrissy likes to have professional pictures taken of the boys every three months or so.  We’ve been to a lot of places for photos, but I think that we have settled on the studio in our local Wal-Mart.   The photographers there always manage to make Aiden smile and they’re very accommodating with our requests.  Also, they are willing to sell us all the images on a CD with copyright permissions.

Chrissy had a number of poses in mind for this year (and a change of clothes for both of the boys), so we hit each one in turn.  Our photographer was very helpful, and took care of everything that Chrissy wanted.  We went with a split theme of Christmas and “Indiana University” (we seem to collect IU-branded clothes) this time.  The pictures turned out fantastic, and many of them will go out with this year’s Christmas cards.

Chrissy recently found some time to take some Halloween photos of Aiden and Gavin.  Yes, Halloween was two weeks ago, but it’s hard to find time for these things when you’ve got two kids!  She could have easily blown it off, but Halloween photos are an important family tradition in our house.  We’ve got fabric backdrops and props and everything!

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

An unintended part of this tradition has been the choice of clothing.  Gavin gets all of Aiden’s baby clothes, which have been in storage for two years, including the Halloween-themed clothes.  So what we end up with is a photo of Gavin in the same clothes and almost the same pose as the one that was taken of Aiden two Halloweens ago.

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

This brings us an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast our two boys.  When they were only a few months old, they looked pretty much the same.  Gavin has more hair, and Aiden was almost a month younger at his first Halloween, but they still look remarkably alike.  Unfortunately, Gavin didn’t get as many outfits or backdrops as Aiden did, but remember, Chrissy has two kids to manage now!

Aiden (2006)

Aiden (2008)

But then there are also the differences between then and now!  Although Aiden still has the ceramic pumpkin that sports his name across the front, that is where the similarities end!  He’s gotten to be such a big boy over the last two years.  We’ll have to see what memories next Halloween brings us!

I’ve been uploading a photo a day (actually three photos per day) to Flickr for the last 31 days.  It hasn’t become an abominable chore yet, but I have found it difficult to make time for new pictures every day.   It’s also a bit of a pain to edit every photo once they’re sent, since Picnik takes forever and a day to load, but the results are well worth it.  In fact, you can already see how Aiden and Gavin have changed over the last month.  The long term results should be very gratifying.

I learned of a 3D photo gallery tool called FotoViewr from a friend on Twitter.  You just pop in your Flickr handle, select a subset of pictures to display (by set name or by tag word) and then choose a 3D format.  FotoViewr then creates an interactive photo gallery of your last thirty photos.  I really like the “wall” format, shown above, but the “floor” format is also very cool.  There are also links to each photo on Flickr and a full-screen mode (although my monitor resolution is too high to make this work well).

The best part is that you can embed a FotoViewr gallery in any blog post.  This would come in handy if I uploaded lots of pictures to Flickr, but I’m only using it for my 365 projects now.  There’s even a WordPress plugin to show a FotoViewr gallery on your blog sidebar, but it might be too small to see clearly.  I’ve downloaded it and will play with the settings on our blog later.  Expect more FotoViewr galleries from us in the future!

Flickr is an online photo management and sharing site. I upload a lot of our family photos in the gallery on our web site, so I had never bought into the Flickr phenomenon before.  However, it turns out that I get a free Pro account because I use AT&T as my internet provider, so it was worth a look. I found that Flickr is also a social media site, allowing users to join photo groups, designate other users as buddies, and comment on interesting photos.

“Project 365” is a gimmick that PhotoJoJo introduced.  To participate, you upload a photo a day for an entire year. Aiden grew up so fast in his first year that I decided to document Gavin’s growth this way.  Aiden will be growing too, so he’s got his own 365 project. For fun, I also joined the “365 Toys” group, and I’m taking a picture of a Transformer a day (in six years, I might have photographed my whole collection if I stick with it). It’s hard to keep to this plan, since it requires taking pictures every day, uploading three of them to Flickr, then adding titles and comments to each one. Too much like work.

All of the Flickr photos are parts of larger photo shoots, but I only upload a single photo per day to Flickr.  I may upload some of the complete sets to our web site gallery, but there are many sets that never make it that far (we’ve got twelve gigabytes of photos of Gavin so far, and he’s only three weeks old).  It will be interesting to look back in a year and see all the changes that our boys have made in that time.  I’ve put a link to our Flickr page on the navigation bar (to the right), so check out our 365 Projects!

I finally got caught up on all the photo galleries that I haven’t bothered to make in the last month or so.  In all, eight new galleries were added to our album tonight.  Lots of Aiden photos in the mix, including galleries of Aiden in his toy box, Aiden with a mohawk, Aiden eating whipped cream straight from the can, and Aiden playing with balloons.  There’s more baby cuteness here than one person can handle in one sitting, so please act responsibly.

I also posted Aiden’s 18 month photos. We try to get professional photos taken of Aiden every six months. We’ve tried a bunch of different photographers (Sears, Olan Mills, etc.), but this time Chrissy decided to try Wal-Mart. Too low brow, you say? Well, they were very professional and took some very good pictures. Aiden was very cooperative and smiled a lot. We bought the CD package with reproduction privileges, so the lower resolution samples are now in our photo gallery.