Take Weekly Baby Photos, from the workbench

Many of you have asked questions here, on Flickr, and on Facebook about how the weekly photos that we are taking to document Clara’s first year are truly done. After answering a bunch of you individually, we figured the topic deserved a quickie “how to” post to collectively take care of anyone else out there who is been pondering how we end up with images like this. You know we enjoy a step by step walkthrough. And documenting photos of your family can certainly fall under Hands-on art and decor – especially if they are framed or even collected in a big coffee table book (which we eventually plan to do).

We are not professional photographers, expert photoshoppers, or even seasoned baby wranglers… but after twelve weeks of taking shots of Clara on a fabric background and adding her age to her onesie “in post” we have developed a system that seems to work fairly well.

• Clara wears a plain white onesie (so far the same one, although she’s about to outgrow it) and we use Photoshop to add the text later
• We have only need one yard of fabric for each shot at this point, which helps keep the cost of the project down
• We typically snag our fabric at discount stores like Hancock or JoAnn Fabrics and use 40% off coupons to further save money
• We have also used already-owned fabric (and on-hand blankets & pillow cases) as backgrounds that are 100% free
• We shoot them in the evening (around 5:30-6:30ish) because the light is indirect, which means no harsh shadows and no squinty baby
• We take the photos in our sunroom because it gets the most natural light (you might get a similar look by setting your baby on a blanket outside in the early evening).
• We use a Nikon D3000 (which we are learning to use thanks to a lot of your advice).
  
• To keep photos looking consistent from week-to-week we consistently white balance the camera against Clara’s onesie before we begin (most DLSR cameras have a setting for this)
• We typically take between 75-100 shots to get one final frame we both enjoy (yeah, we are a little obsessed with the beanette)

Now that we are all caught up, I thought I’d breeze through what happens after we have snapped away at our compact model and it is time to finalizing our weekly image. First up is the sometimes long, frequently difficult process of selecting on our single go-to image. We use Apple’s iPhoto to sort through all of them, deleting the bad ones and flagging the good ones until we have narrowed it down to the one that not only represents Clara best at that age, but also is not too similar to past weeks’ photos (since we like them to feel as diverse as possible when it comes to composition).

Once selected, we pull the winning image into Photoshop. Again, we are not experts, but we have honed a fairly good process for achieving the fairly convincing look of text printed on a onesie. First we do some basic touch-ups like cropping the photo or lightening it up a smidge if necessary, and occasionally we do a bit of virtually smoothing out if the fabric has any crazy wrinkles that the iron did not seem to take care of (with the Healing Brush and the Clone Stamper). As a comparison of sorts, here is the original picture on top as it looked straight from the camera, and the slightly lightened and de-wrinkled version below it:

Then we add the text. At this point we typically simply copy the text layer from the previous week’s file, but in case you are starting from scratch we use a font call Fyra for the circled number and Otari for the word “weeks.” Both are free from the site FontSquirrel. Once dragged in we make sure the week is correct (in this case, we changed the week number to “12”) and we rotate the whole thing to line up with the angle of Clara’s body.

Then we select the color for the text. Typically we snag some color from the fabric itself (using the Color Picker tool) so the whole image coordinates, but sometimes we pick something complimentary to the fabric, like week one’s plum-magenta text that we liked against the green background.

The trick we came up with for making the text appear to be printed on the onesie is a combination of layer style and opacity. We set the text layer to “Multiply” and bring down the layer opacity to somewhere between 60% – 80% depending on how saturated the color is. Note: sometimes we have to adjust the color slightly after these steps to make sure it has not gotten too light or washed out.

Here is what the image looks likes before and after the “Multiply” and “Opacity” steps. You can see how it has subtly picked up the shading of the onesie behind it which tricks our eyes sufficient into thinking that it is been there all along. Oh, and sometimes Miss Clara’s outfit is a bit wrinkled so I have to do some text chopping and skewing, but I have not gotten that process down sufficient that I’d feel comfortable advising others. Simply trust me that it is easier when her onesie is smooth (which is certainly the case lately since she’s outgrowing it)!

With that, we are done!

Now that we are nearly 1/4 of the way done with this year-long project we are getting even more excited to amass all 52 images so we can get them printed in a nicely bound book for our coffee table (and the coffee tables of a few adoring grandparents). Plus we certainly think Clara herself will get a kick out of looking back at her weekly growth (and range of adorable expressions) when she gets a little older. Note: You can see bigger versions of the current dozen here on Flickr (we add the latest one every week there too).

Oh, and as for all of this fabric that we are slowly collecting, the jury is still out on what we will do with it (make a quilt, sew some baby clothes, etc). Though our latest idea is that we will whip up an eclectic-looking banner or bunting that we can break out for birthday parties and even yearly growth pictures of Clara (sort of as an homage to her first year on Earth). At least until she gets too old and embarrassed to indulge us.

We hope this little picture play-by-play was helpful to anyone looking to adopt a similar method of documenting their child (or pooch, we could totally get behind that!). We’d also enjoy to hear about any lively ways you folks have captured changes in your kids, family, or even your home – or if you’ve spotted someone else doing it in an interesting way (like the adorable Mila’s Daydreams project that we enjoy). Spill those sentimental beans.

PS: If you are looking to achieve a similar look but do not want to bother with Photoshop, we learned of a company called Sticky Bellies that sells removable monthly milestone stickers that can be applied to any clothing.