by Bex
I mentioned in
my post with my underwater snaps of the twins that we had a professional shoot booked at
Oaklands pool where we take the babies for swimming lessons. We had a great time with
Zac, the photographer from
Little Dolphin Images and the 'baby handler' for the day, Roz from
Swim2me.
Obviously the set up was much better than when I hired the pool with Mum & Dad to assist me with the babies and my little G11 compact in it's housing. Zac had a blue backdrop to hide the tiles on the side of the pool and of course the full underwater set up with an SLR housing and two strobes as well as off camera lighting. My Dad took some photos of the shoot, (with permission from Zac) since we were the only ones in that time slot, so we got some behind the scenes pictures of us in the pool too.
We saw some of the photos as the shoot progressed and we loved them! I was so excited to see them all and select the ones we wanted to buy. They are fantastic and we ended up with a great selection!
It was very relaxed and went so quickly as we had fun trying a few different shots including a surprisingly successful attempt to capture both twins together underwater!
Luckily the babies are quite relaxed underwater (particularly Priya) thanks to our fantastic lessons with Rebecca from
Love Baby Swim School. We've now completed two terms over the last 3 months and the babies have made some great progress.
We also got some with flowing fabric, I think the one of Priya looks like she has wings:
And we got a family shot (where I was more of an issue as I hate opening my eyes underwater and water going up my nose but I managed to suffer for the art and put on a smile!)
As far as professional photography goes, Zac's prices are very reasonable, especially for a specialist shoot like underwater. The shoot itself was £40 (per child so pricier for us with the twins at £80) and there was a choice afterwards of how many images you want instead of having to buy a package. For just one image it was £69 but we opted for the package of 10 for £119 and paid an extra £10 for black & white conversions. I thought about doing that part myself as we get high res digital images but given I am already struggling to find time to edit my own images of the twins and it was only £10 extra, we thought it was worth it, plus Zac does a better job than I could anyway!
In total it cost £210 which is about the same as our other professional shoots of the bump and newborn images we had done by Lauren, Laura and Jude. Again, this was something I would have regretted if we didn't do it, plus I picked up some tips for having another go myself too ;) It's just as well we're good at finding bargains for everything else since I keep spending so much on photos!
