Some Exciting News

On the Launchpad blog, we typically share the latest updates on our photography projects and this entry is no different, except that this time it is a little more personal because my wife is expecting! We wanted to create a fun image to share the good news and found inspiration in the “Three Bears.” A pair of newborn sneakers stands in for baby Buccianti until he or she is here to fill those shoes.

Propped up on a few pregnancy books, I remotely triggered my Nikon, focusing the lens on Elizabeth and the baby’s shoes before stepping into the frame. The picture alone turned out very nice, but we felt that adding a few hand drawn illustrations would turn the cuteness factor up a notch. Elizabeth provided several pages of hand drawn banners, doodles and words for me to choose from and in the end we decided to keep it simple by just naming the three bears along with our birth year.

Family and friends loved the photo and we even ordered postcards so that our relatives can have a printed copy. Have you ever made a creative announcement with a photo? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

It's a Dog's Life

This past weekend was a busy one as Launchpad worked on two different photo shoots. We first shot a workout series that we’ll be posting more about at a later date and then quickly regrouped to get ready for some really hairy models.

That’s right, a dog photo shoot. But I’m not talking about capturing dogs running through the lawn or chasing after a ball. This was an all out portrait session. I don’t think I have ever heard the words sit or stay so many times in my life.

A big thanks to the dogs and their owners who came out to the shoot. We got some great shots like the one of Lou, a bulldog, pictured above. If you go to my portfolio and click on nature, you can see the rest but what you can’t see is all the blobs of slobber I had to Photoshop out of Lou’s picture!

To capture this look I set up a solid blue paper backdrop with a large octobox as key light, two long lightboxes, called strip boxes, to add highlights and a reflector.

The dogs were very well behaved, especially after we plied them with plenty of toys and treats. For Yoshi, the Shiba Inu, we had to break out the big guns and scrounge up a piece of cheese before he would agree to the shoot. Models, what can I say?

All in all, the dogs look great and we have some very happy owners. Not many pet owners can say they have a professional portrait of their dog!