More Holly

A couple of new pictures of lovely Holly, who is 2 months old today. I’ll add the commentary later…

 

Meet The Relatives (1)

So we took Holly on her first UK tour, up to Barnsley where great grandmas and grandads were waiting for her, with chocolate biscuits, cheese & pickle sandwiches and gallons of tea. At four days old, her face is changing every day, losing the extreme chubbiness which characterised her first few hours, gradually becoming – by popular opinion – pretty much perfect:

In the picture below, just out of shot, Holly’s Mum has lifted her legs in the air, showing her bum to the world while changing her nappy. That’s Holly’s legs and bum, not her Mum’s…:

And having mastered the art of the frown, the grimace, the quizzical look and the all-hell-just-broke-loose shriek, here’s Holly practicing the big one – the smile:

They say it’s simply wind, but what do ‘they’ know…

Holly Day Photos

I was sitting peacefully in our back garden, reading a book in the sunshine, late afternoon on Friday 11th September, 2009 – our due date. A date which has other connotations these days, and other, blacker memories, but for us it will now always be the day that our first baby announced that she was ready to arrive.

I’m half way through The Caine Mutiny, for the umpteenth time, when at 4pm, Marie called out to me from inside the house in a curiously uncertain voice. “Andy, I think me waters have broken…”.

Just over twelve hours later, neither of us were uncertain about what had just happened:

There she was, born at 04:36 on Saturday, 12th September 2009, our baby Holly Hiseman. I took the picture above just nine minutes after she was born…

We’d arrived at Peterborough Hospital’s maternity ward at around 21:30, after a few hours of tests and a short trip back home. Her mum Bev came with us, and her dad John stayed at our house with our 9yr old boy, Devon. By this time Marie’s contractions were pretty tough on her, but early on the trusty gas & air machine was all she needed:

And so began the long night. An epidural joined the gas & air machine, which relaxed Marie no end, but it was a gruelling few hours…:

When the final stage came, Marie gave birth astonishingly fast. The final push lasted just eleven minutes. For 45 years I’ve heard people rate their great life experiences against the moment their first child was born, and I now understand why nothing can ever top it. Miraculous, overwhelming, unreal, and brilliant beyond words.

For a long time afterwards, we – and Holly – were quiet, simply murmuring to each other, lost in the size of the occasion:

And through the next twelve hours of tests, examinations, form-filling and waiting around, Marie and Holly stayed almost supernaturally patient, quietly getting to know each other while the world around them went about its business:

Mid-afternoon it all changed, and the volume levels increased, when Holly’s big brother Devon got to meet his new sister for the first time ever:

Now, a day later, we’re all happily getting used to each other. We love little Holly May Hiseman to bits, and we’re looking forward to showing her off to all of our loved ones:

She’s beautiful.

Mischief

We went on a walk to try and encourage Marie’s baby to make an appearance – you’ll do anything when the nine months is up to get the baby out. I put the little 50mm prime lens on the camera and set myself the task of finding a picture or two that captured the character of the afternoon. There’s something about using a fixed-length lens which makes you work a bit harder on the composition.

Inevitably, Devon’s innate 9 year old sense of mischief meant that, more often than not, I swung the camera his way, because he was the most entertaining thing in the park that day:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/320 at f 3.2, ISO 400, hand held no flash. Look at those eyes – not an ounce of uncertainty.

Not far behind Dev in the mischief stakes is his grandma Bev, who as has been seen elsewhere in this blog, really doesn’t care. This isn’t a dance, it’s Bev trying not to get yet another smack on the behind from the whippy stick which Devon conveniently found on the ground:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/3200 at f 2.2, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

And this is Devon brandishing his whippy, bottom-striping stick having wrestled it back under his control. Oh God I hope he doesn’t turn out to be a boring pen-pusher later in life, this photo proves that – when he was nine, at least – he had all the good-natured fizz you could ever want in a person:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/1250 at f 3.2, ISO 400, hand held no flash. All images shot in colour and converted to Mono in Lightroom, then finished off in Paint Shop Pro. My usual workflow. I’ve got all the books, magazines and DVD tutorials, and Photoshop CS3, but you know I still think you can produce great post-production effects without going to the extravagance of Layers etc. For a photo blog, at least. I take the easy route because – at the moment – very few of my pictures ever get printed.

I guess Devon has to grow up some day, maybe we’ll look back on these images when he’s a stroppy teenager (there are already signs…), and we’ll wonder why things had to change.

A Bit Of Everything

What with a baby on the way, hospital trips to sort Devon out, oh and a bit of work, it’s not been a photo blog summer. So I’m just going to put up a sequence of one-off photos which have absolutely nothing to do with each other at all, except that they were taken by me. So let’s kick off with an experiment I did one summer’s evening:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 20 secs at f 4.5, ISO 200, on a tripod no flash. This was a long-exposure test I did one evening after watching the farmer cut the big field behind our house. It was a lovely peaceful evening and I decided to play around with some of our garden lights.

And now for some mugs:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 50mm, 1/320 at f 2.8, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

And here’s Marie’s bump, 8 months in, August 2009:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 52mm, 1/20 at f 2.8, ISO 1600, hand held no flash. Practising low-light, slow-shutter handheld photography with my best lens, the hefty Nikon 24-70mm 2.8, ready for when the baby’s born.

This is a shiny Mini on a wet early evening stroll around Stamford:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/30 at f 9, ISO 800, hand held no flash.

Here’s our future ASBO trying to look tough:

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 95mm, 1/13 at f 5.3, ISO 250, hand held no flash.

And a wall somewhere in deepest Rutland, lovely high resolution shot that I got about right:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/160 at f 9, ISO 200, hand held no flash.

This is our beloved stray cat Lucy, moments after she first appeared in our lives – sitting atop our secret garden (pre-decking), half-chewed ear, crying out for food (which we gave her):

Nikon D300, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens at 200mm, 1/4000 at f 5.6, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

And to finish, here’s Marie and her family, on Grandma Anne’s birthday a couple of years ago, in a reet good carvery somewhere in West Yorkshire:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX lens at 10mm, 1/60 at f 4, ISO 200, hand held with flash.

Water Babe

Bev Oakley, mother, international playgirl, up for owt:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/125 at f 4.0, ISO 500, hand held no flash. The scene: outside our house in Stamford, British summer time, 2009. Just for a change, the skies went dark and it started pelting it down. Ten minutes of really heavy, big old thundery rain.

Having spent most of the day decorating our hallway, Bev looked outside and thought: I’m having some of that. John’s thinking: wet T-shirt show. Marie’s thinking: Mam, don’t.

Andy Wears A Dress

And then I was born, not in a hospital, but in a bungalow in Somerset. My Dad was managing an oil terminal near Bridgwater, and my Mum was a schoolteacher in the village of Pawlett. We lived in Puriton where, in 6 Newlyn Crescent, little Andy arrived. I quickly set about changing the fashion rules of contemporary society, and here – aged around three – I’m wearing the iconic first ‘hoodie’:

Big brother Mark – a year older – sports a rather gay cardigan, and I’m glad to report that currently, at the age of 46, he is beginning to favour cardigans once again. I, on the other hand, have a 9-year old boy whom, I’m very much afraid, will wear hoodies throughout the next ten years merely to cover his face in the act of committing crimes. It’s my own fault for starting the hoodie craze in the first place.

Below, a flash back even further. I’m about eight months here, wearing a woolly cardie (as is Mark), and definitely also wearing a dress. In my defence, I was young, I was trying new things, and it was the weekend. Mark is showing the curl of hair that has plagued his forehead throughout his life – it’s there to this day. Get it cut short Mark, use a bit of my American Crew fibre, spike it up a bit. Here he shows his Mexican bandit hat, probably because he was having another bad hair day:

Who would have known that those legs of mine, twenty five years later, would have become two of the most prized assets of not one, but two pub football teams in the Jewsons East Kent Sunday League, Division Five.

When I’m Seventeen

Devon has eight years to wait until he can legally drive a car. But that doesn’t stop a boy thinking ahead. The trouble is, when you’re nine and obviously a very cool dude, do you go for the Dodge, or the Chevy?

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/320 at f 3.5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Tweaked in Lightroom to give some warmth to the greens, yellows, oranges… Honestly, when you’re looking at some of the coolest cars in…Doncaster…just how do you choose?

Especially when the Chevy has a trunk large enough to basically live in:

Nikon D300, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 26mm, 1/60 at f 3.5, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Took away the greens to colour-pop this one, just for fun. He looks pretty grown-up here. But will you just look at that car? It’ll look even cooler in 2017, when he can drive the thing.

No, we didn’t buy anything. This evening was one of my family experiments – I took Marie and Devon to Doncaster, where we met up with my good old friend James Haigh (who I met when I was 11), to watch a presentation on Project Bloodhound - the forthcoming 1,000mph World Land Speed Record car – given by one of my true heroes, Richard Noble.  Noble is the former WLSR holder, and just two weeks before Devon and I watched the excellent two-part documentary about Thrust SSC, which Noble created and which was driven by Andy Green, from our nearby air force base at RAF Wittering. I’m a bit of a land speed record nut, and thought it’d be cool to take everyone to see what was sure to be a riveting presentation.

Well, it was – if you’re a petrolhead. I’m semi-petrolhead, as is James, so we’d happily have sat thru the whole thing (it’s an amazing story – watch out for it), but Marie and Devon had spent more exciting evenings watching paint dry, so to save the occasion I did what all Dads have to do, frequently: namely, give up your passion, a little bit, and go the way of the majority. Still, I enjoyed what I saw, as did my good buddy James, whose own story – including emigrating to Sweden, and driving a succession of ‘unfortunate’ cars – may be told another time.

There’s Always One

One thing unites all the two billion families, around the world, of every colour and creed. It’s the rule of There’s Always One. Recently I caught some evidence on camera, see if you can spot the One in our family:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens, 1/60 at f 4, ISO 200, hand held with flash. Front row, from left: mother in law Bev, Tracey’s Mum Iris, The One, big brother Mark. Back row, from left: father in law John, Mark’s partner Tracey. Occasion: they all just dropped in. Marie had finally got over her morning sickness, and sensing a rare welcoming atmosphere Mark and Tracey brought Iris up north, tiring of the easy life in their luxury Kent mansion, to see how the other half live. Before they joined us, they picked up The One, luring her from her cave with some cheese, and brought her over. Despite being heavily drugged, The One slipped her harness just as I was taking a peaceful family picture, and immediately afterwards caused over £11,000 worth of damage including destroying our Panasonic plasma TV, several camera lenses and a rare porcelain fertility symbol. All to be expected, and nobody thinks badly of her because, after all, There’s Always One.

We had her taken away, of course, and she was humanely put down in Peterborough later that day. We placed these flowers on the kitchen windowsill in commemoration:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm lens, 1/100 at f 8, ISO 200, hand held with flash. Blinds custom made and inspired by HUSTLE off the telly, note Yankee Candle to left of windowsill – expensive candles-in-jars which apparently people collect, so we bought a couple, lit them, and the smell made pregnant Marie feel sick, so we haven’t ever lit them again. More money that could have been better spent with The Big Issue guy on the High Street. Spot mugs colour-coordinated with blinds, these things matter desperately.

Spaghetti and Freckles

Devon, after a demanding battle with a plate of spaghetti bolognese one Saturday lunchtime:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f1.8 prime lens, 1/125 at f 4, ISO 500, hand held no flash. He’s probably going to hate his freckles as he gets older, but they make him incredibly photogenic. The spaghetti sauce on his shirt front matched his hair. I tried to show him the fork-circularmotion-spoon technique, but he quickly lost patience with it. Venue: Ask Italian restaurant in Stamford, Lincs, our home town. I worked hard on this one in Lightroom – vignette, colours, exposure – and I think it really shows. Happy with this picture.