My wife and I are thrilled to welcome our second daughter into the world. Both mommy and baby are doing great. IU Health in Carmel, Indiana has been tremendous in delivering both of our daughters. While we have some downtime here in the hospital I wanted to show off a couple of photos from the big day and talk through how I took them!

Lens Choice

For photographing the birth I wanted something that would work well indoors with no flash and I wanted the creamy 'bokeh' effect to blur any distracting backgrounds. To get that blurred bokeh effect you need a lens with a low f stop number. This reduces your depth of field, the ISO required in low light conditions, and increases the blurry bokeh effect. I rented a Nikkor 85mm f1.4 for the occasion and have been extremely pleased with it's performance. The only issue I've had with the lens was the minimum focus distance being 3', and the distance required to frame a person requiring to usually be about 4-5' away from the subject. In hindsight I might have been better with the 58mm f1.4 lens, but that would have reduced lens compression. All in all you can't always get exactly what you want out of a lens, but the pictures have turned out phenomenal and I couldn't be happier.

I wanted to get a few pictures up while we were in the hospital, and there's still plenty more to come!