After going to FanExpo on Saturday, on Sunday I found myself back in Toronto again just a couple of blocks away at Jen & Matt's condo. Jen is pregnant (congratulations!) and they decided to throw a "gender identification" party for their family and friends.

They revealed the gender by having a special cake made with blue whipped cream in the center if it was a boy, and pink if it was a girl. Angela asked me to take pictures of the cake cutting for Jen, and I was so focused on making sure the knife and cake were in focus that I got confused when Matt pulled the knife out of the cake, held it up, and everyone cheered. After a while I realized that the knife was covered in blue whipped cream!

So, congratulations again to Jen and Matt on being pregnant with a baby boy! I can't wait to meet him!

While we were partying, Aila had fun practicing her walking (her new record is 44 steps before falling down) and playing with a toy car that another boy her age had brought to the party. I managed to get this photo of her as we were lying on the floor playing catch with the car.

For all you budding photographers out there, this is yet another reason why you shouldn't be afraid to shoot at high ISO settings. I couldn't have taken this photo at a lower setting without using a flash, which would have been cumbersome to carry and operate. By cranking the ISO up, I could shoot with confidence knowing that I wouldn't get blurry photos due to camera shake. A little noise reduction in post processing cleared up a lot of the noise without distorting the photo, and whatever noise remains is quite acceptable in my opinion... considering that the bottom line is that I got a wonderful shot of Aila.

It does help that the 5D Mark II has quite good noise performance, but from what I have seen a lot of consumer level cameras are coming out now with similarly amazing noise performance at high ISO.

Technical details: This photo was taken with my 5D Mark II + Tamron 28-75 at 57mm, ISO 3200, f/4 for 1/160th of a second.

Comments

That's a great photo!  and 44 steps - wow!