Megan Adair MacKenzie was born at 2:51 a.m. on Sunday, May 18.  She weighed 9 lbs. 2 oz. and was 20.5 inches long.  She’s doing well, and seems to be a much calmer baby than Charlie was.  This morning, she was napping beside Becky when Becky got up for a few minutes.  I was watching Megan, and she opened her eyes, saw that Becky wasn’t there, stretched, yawned, and went back to sleep.  Charlie would never have done that.  We’re trying not to count our proverbial unhatched chickens, but so far things look pretty good on the sleep front.

The picture above was taken by me yesterday, Saturday, May 24.  We went to our favorite local photographer’s studio, and she let me take a few pictures, too.  (She would have let me take a lot more, but I’m not very comfortable in the studio environment, especially while being closely watched by a professional photographer, and I really wanted to get on with getting the rest of the pictures that we came for.)

Since Charlie was born, she has started shooting digital, which didn’t surprise me.  What did surprise me was that she was shooting with a Digital Rebel XTi, which is a consumer camera.  She had a better portrait lens than I do, certainly, but I was surprised that she hadn’t invested in a better body.  (I’m pretty sure her lens was the EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS USM.  I was a little surprised that she wasn’t shooting with an L-series lens, but they don’t seem to make a comparable L-series lens.  The closest thing is the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM, but if I’m a portrait photographer, I’d rather have the 17-24mm focal length than the 55-70mm length, especially on a body with a small sensor.)  I was also surprised that she was shooting JPEG rather than RAW and that she actually had the camera set to shoot black and white most of the time, rather than color.  I think both of these come from the fact that she was a black and white film photographer and does very little out-of-camera processing, but both still seemed like a bit of a waste to me.  (In both cases, you are throwing away data.)

I think we’re going to suck it up and buy the high resolution digital files with a copyright release, rather than pay through the nose for prints.  We’ll spend more in total, for sure, than if we bought prints, but we’ll wind up making a heck of a lot more prints, too, I think.  I might just go ahead and use one of my own images for the birth announcements, though.