Nikon D3S, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 48mm, 1/100 at f 2.8, ISO 3200, hand held no flash. Touch wood I’ll never run out of pictures to take of Holly, but I do run out of words to write about her – I think the pictures say it all.

Here she’s actually watching her Mum’s feet wiggle around, but there’s a distinctly teacher-ly look about her sometimes. Like most babies Holly has mastered the Unblinking Stare pretty early on, and she can be pretty scary. Not this time though, here she’s simply in typically full-concentration mode:

Nikon D3S, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 35mm, 1/160 at f 2.8, ISO 3200, hand held no flash. At six months she’s well into the ‘much more interesting’ stage now, where she’s taking an active interest in everything around her. Still plenty of random hand-flapping and owl-like head swivelling, but as you can see from the picture above she knows how to lock onto something and give it her full attention.

But sometimes she just larks about with her Mum, Dad and Brother:

Nikon D3S, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 24mm, 1/100 at f 2.8, ISO 3200, hand held no flash. I know this is over-exposed but it was that sort of light; we’d just moved into our new place in Shafton, on the outskirts of Barnsley, and a beautiful dose of sunshine made our first morning there a lovely one.

Nikon D3S, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 66mm, 1/1600 at f 4.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash. The 24-70 is one sharp lens for sure. Makes a nice change to use the D3s with plenty of light around, too. Since I got it, it’s been almost all low-light shooting.

We were waiting for Mum to return from what proved to be a fruitless trip to Next (aka our third home), and Holly was lying in her car seat, shielded from the bright sun by one of those car sun screens stuck on the window. Yes, before you get all Health & Safety on me, this wasn’t direct sunlight, and it was filtered enough to enable Holly to look around without squinting – but as you can see in the picture above, I could capture with amazing clarity her lovely big baby blues.

Note the start of a big old moustache, too.

And yes it’s official, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth:

Nikon D3S, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 40mm, 1/200 at f 4.5, ISO 640, hand held no flash.

I believe we’ll be seeing more of this expression over the years, usually after the loud noise of something breaking.

Here he is, at ten and a fortnight, wearing his figure-hugging new ‘Skin’ - which makes him look like like a rugby league player in waiting – atop his new bike, which conveniently is an exact match for his Skin colour:

Nikon D3S, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/1000 at f 5.0, ISO 200, hand held no flash. The perfect combination of man and machine. Devon can now reach his Grandad Ralph and Grandma Anne’s (where this pic was taken) in around 4.5 minutes. He rarely leaves 5th gear, so he’s slow to start but, like a rugby league half back, hard to stop once he’s in motion. The bike has a bell on it so that he can alert nearby ten year old girls as to his dashing presence.

And putting up a new lampshade in her bedroom:

And watching Dad burn the toast yet again:

And she’s always in hot pursuit of Jesse the cat, now that she’s got her own set of wheels:

Here, a rare shot of your author with Dad and big brother Mark, in a pose straight from the pages of Scorcher:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX wide lens at 10mm, 1/500 at f 4.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash. Note Dad’s perma-tan, yet another dodgy jumper from Mark and grey bits running riot over yours truly’s hair.

And here’s Mark again, propping up Mum (who was on good form) to make sure she doesn’t tip over onto my relatively immaculate lawn (she’d had a glass of something fizzy):

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX wide lens at 10mm, 1/800 at f 4.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

Sometimes you’ve just got to take your own picture…

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX wide lens at 10mm, 1/3200 at f 4.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash. Holly was 19 days old when this picture was taken. Marie: 28. Andy: an astronomical 45. Note Holly’s dark hair: she’s since gone blonde…

Remarkable, here’s my Dad spouting off about something. Never would have believed it myself, but the camera doesn’t lie:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/8000 at f 3.2, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Of course, he was as quiet as a mouse the rest of the day …

Here’s the whole cast of characters:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX wide lens at 10mm, 1/800 at f 8.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash. From the left: Iris (Tracey’s Mum, partly hidden) … my Mum Mary … Tracey (Mark’s partner) … Mairi (my stepmum, holding Holly) … my wife Marie … her Dad John and Mum Bev … my Dad Richard … my big brother Mark (in Alan Partridge eyebrow-raising mode) .. and – a special guest on the day – my Mum’s sister, my Auntie Margaret, making a very rare, very welcome visit to be with the family.

Out the front, Devon’s Stamford Massive had arrived to lower the average age back below fifty. Devon had survived a very nasty bike accident about an hour before, so at this point he is still looking a little peaky:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX wide lens at 10mm, 1/1000 at f 4.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

For gorehounds, here’s the damage to Devon’s upper lip, cheek and chin … Devon wouldn’t pretend that this particular bike accident was a walk in the park, it wasn’t. In fact he nearly set the burglar alarms off with the noise he made, which definitely interrupted the party. However, after a bit of soothing and much bravery, he was back out on the street, enjoying his status as the day’s key accident victim:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX wide lens at 10mm, 1/1250 at f 4.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

Devon’s friends kindly staged their own reconstruction of the dramatic bike crash:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX wide lens at 10mm, 1/1000 at f 4.0, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

And the day ended with one of my favourite pictures of just Devon and my lovely wife Marie, at the end of a long and happy day:

Nikon D300, Sigma 10-20mm EX wide lens at 10mm, 1/25 at f 4.0, ISO 200, hand held no flash. Well done Marie, good baby. Congrats Devon, you survived a major scrape, and the scar’s going to be a beauty. A really, really good day…

Nikon D3S, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/320 at f 4.0, ISO 800, hand held no flash. Note Holly’s expression: I think this was the first time she’d ever heard her Mum sound apologetic, in over six months on the planet. All I will say, Holly, is make the most of it, and don’t expect another one until at least junior school.

That same afternoon, Ralph the Shafton puppet-master placed his great-granddaughter between his razor-sharp trouser creases and tested her parents’ claim that she loves to stand and lock her knees … pretty early in some things is our Holls, and pretty late in others – like laughing, for example. She smiles all the time, but the closest we’ve come to a laugh was the other day when she watched her Mum throw some nice arrows at Devon’s new dartboard. Mum nearly hit the bullseye, but it was her ladylike Eric Bristow impersonation which – almost – got Holly giggling for the first time. Note I didn’t say Jocky Wilson, because I value my cobblers and we might need them to give Holly and Devon another brother or sister:

Nikon D3S, Nikon 24-70mm f 2.8 lens at 38mm, 1/80 at f 6.3, ISO 5000, hand held no flash. Unlike the previous picture, this shows the D3s working a lot harder, up at ISO 5000 and coping well. Three months after getting it, I really don’t worry about pushing it up to anything under ISO 6400, which is pretty astonishing. This picture simply wouldn’t have been possible – in any reasonable quality – three years ago. The D3s has just pushed the bar even further, after the D3 first reinvented low-light photography. I have hardly used my flashgun since getting the new camera: it’s not quite redundant, but I use it an awful lot less now. The result is a lot more reality, the snapshots you take are much more accurate representations of how the scene looked to the naked eye.

Note the change of bib in the picture above. If I had shares, I’d put it in a bib-making company these days. I never knew just how essential to daily life the humble bib is. We have amassed what seems like a thousand bibs, which are all steadily being stained the unmistakable orange hue of regurgitated Organic Carrot & Sweet Potato…

But once in a while out I went on a snowy day, normally with next to no time, and every now and then I managed to take a decent picture:

Nikon D3S, Nikon 70-300 mm VR lens at 185mm, 1/200 at f 22, ISO 1000, hand held no flash. One of those race-against-time situations, I zipped about after work one afternoon in early January 2010, trying to find something to inspire me. Late in the process I got lucky, with a stunning light show from the setting sun, reflecting off an ice-covered back road a few miles from our home in Lincolnshire. The colours are as shot, and apart from a tiny amount of sharpening this is more or less how it came out of the camera. I experimented with a whole host of settings, but liked this one the best – nice narrow aperture to keep it crisp front-to-back, and a medium zoom from the reliable 70-300mm VR lens to keep it in the sweet spot. With the D3S, pushing it to ISO 1000 to achieve a decent shutter speed wasn’t even something I thought about.

This was an absolutely gorgeous afternoon. I excused myself from work and started by surveying the scene from our back garden:

Nikon D3S, Nikon 14-24mm f 2.8 lens at 14mm, 1/80 at f 22, ISO 1000, hand held no flash. Please excuse the photographer’s footprints, which rather spoil the pristine nature of the view, but will you look at that day…

For those family members who don’t get to these behind the scenes type events – which is most of them, with the exception of my brother Robin, who is very much part of the European Tour in his own day job as golf course architect at European Golf Design, and my own Dad, who I try to sneak into as many golf events as possible – what follows is the answer to the frequent question ‘what does Andy do all day?’. In fact, the pictures themselves don’t give many answers, because they don’t show all the talking, the wheeling, the dealing, the running about and the compromise-making that attends these events. They’re great places to meet people who, one day, might help you do what you want to do, and vice versa.

Also there that day were BBC radio DJ Chris Evans and his wife Natasha – you’ll see their picture in there somewhere. Marie and I once spent an evening at a hotel bar in East London putting the world to rights with the future Mrs Evans, a couple of years before she met Chris. She was nice and it’s good to see how well things have worked out for her.

Instead of putting up all the pictures one by one, as normal, I’ve put these into a Gallery format which – so they tell me – should work fine if you click on each picture in turn. So here goes:

By the way, I took these pictures with my Nikon D300 – the D3s was still a twinkle in my eye at this stage.

Or when you’ve just woken up, well before a girl’s had a chance to put her face on:

And especially when you’re having a bad hair day, and that loud kid who keeps appearing just won’t shut his cakehole. I mean, honestly Dad, will you please put it DOWN?