We ended up dividing Casey’s first birthday celebrations into two. For his actual birthday we hit the local park and took him on the Ferris Wheel. It was funny to see Maggie tense up as we neared the top — I truly hope we get the opportunity to visit a real amusement park at some point and I can get her on a proper roller coaster. The park, only a few blocks from our apartment, is a frequent dog walk for me; however, this was the first time I really explored the different rides and stuff they have there. It’s pretty much a fully functional fairground, complete with games and everything.

On the way back from the park we stopped at a local bakery and ordered a birthday cake for his birthday party a few days later. We also grabbed a little cake for that evening, as a Wednesday or not, I didn’t think it was right for the kid to not have cake on the day of his first birthday. Quite unsurprisingly, his first experience with birthday cake was a huge hit.

A couple days after his birthday we did a small party with some friends, grabbing lunch and retiring to our place for cake and some mid-afternoon drinking. The downside to having a kid is that it severily truncates the lateness that you can stay up drinking socializing with friends. The upside is that it completely opens up the door to drinking in the afternoon.

I really wish all our friends and family could have been with us to celebrate this special day, but all-in-all it was good times. And as Casey’s not going to remember any of it but the pictures, we got lots of those too!

Making those photos interesting, other than to friends and family, is not something I’ve ever considered doing, and frankly doubt I have the skills to do. Such is not the case for the amazing work of Adele Enersen, a creative copywriter and stay-at-home mom from Finland. At her blog, Mila’s Daydreams, Adele waits for her daughter to fall asleep and then places her in amazing dreamscapes, which have been hastily constructed with odds and ends lying around her house. The results are fantastic:

Be sure to check out her blog for more photos and information on her book due out next year.

h/t to my friend Melyssa for sharing this with me.

Last night was my sixth time welcoming in a new lunar year here in China. I always approach Chinese New Year’s Eve with a healthy dose of cynical expatations, and I’m always blown away, pun intended, with how it never fails to impress me.

True, the day(s) leading up to CNYE have every ratta-tat-tat sound sending a splash of rage through my spine for its relentless assault on holiday peace and quiet, but when the big event arrives and the entire country ignites into a cacophony of explosive sounds and visuals, it’s hard not to appreciate how truly one-of-a-kind the experience is.

It’s what I imagine people who live in Rio feel during Carnival, or Thai’s during Songkran. At its least, CNYE is annoying and at its worst down right dangerous — but it is, without a doubt, truly awesome.

Canadians are no strangers to fireworks; with decent, if conservative, showings twice a year. But it’s just not the same. No holiday in Canada is. I’m sure the same could be said for most other expat home countries.

Last night was our second time celebrating the new year in Suzhou’s expat ghetto, SIP. The laowai-saturated development zone tends to empty out over the holidays as the foreigners head for beaches and the affluent Chinese pack up the Porsche SUVs and visit their home towns. Last year’s CNYE was hit with a heavy snow, which left things a little bit quiet. Since then we’ve moved into an apartment on the 22nd floor, and I was hoping that similar weather wouldn’t ruin my chances of checking out fireworks at eye-level. I was not disappointed.

With many of our friends out of town, and Casey still too small to really appreciate the chaos and danger of cheap Chinese fireworks, we kept things low-key. Our friends Steven and Angel came over and we picked up some pre-arranged take-out from an excellent local Sichuan place (we had to book the take-out 4 days in advance as demand for the place is so high).

After dinner and some drinks we all headed down to Jinji Hu (“Golden Rooster Lake”) which is a couple blocks away. I had heard that the SIP corporation was launching fireworks from the small island in the centre of the lake and following it with their Spring Festival fountain show. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but was thoroughly impressed.

The 45 minute show featured a decent collection of fireworks a calibre above the typical family-launched stuff, and the fountain choreography was impressive. What I liked most was that I finally had a chance to use my DSLR to shoot some fireworks. There’s nothing uncommon about fireworks in China, but the very thing that makes the whole event so great, also usually makes it terrible to try and shoot — it’s complete pandemonium. The event at the lake gave me a specific spot of sky I could aim at and plenty of time to play with shutter speeds and apertures — I’m pretty slow when it comes to shooting, so extra time is key for me taking anything that’s not a blurry mess of poor crops.

Here are the results:

Fireworks @ Lakeside Park – SIP, Suzhou

Fireworks In Our Community

Maggie, Casey, Angel and Steven

Heading down to the lake Casey didn’t seem too impressed with all the noise, but only a few minutes after arriving he fell asleep and remained so for the whole event (as shown in the above picture).

After things wrapped up at the lake we headed back home and watched the annual CCTV Gala. Well, Angel and Maggie watched it, Steven and I spent most of the time poking fun at it with the rest of the China Tweeple.

As the countdown began, I headed out onto our front balcony to take in the sulphuric spectacular. If you watch about a minute into the video below, you’ll see the camera nearly fall out of my hands as the air right beside me filled with fireworks lit from down below. Nearly peed my pants — great way to start the new year.

All-in-all, it was a great time with great food and great friends. Now in the acrid afterglow, I’ll resume my dour outlook for next year’s bedlamic blast.

But in an effort to revisit a time when I took photos of more than just the cutest baby in the entire world, I’ve created a new collection on Flickr of my favourite photos I’ve taken over the past few years. Some of them are rather horribly over-processed due to at the time having equal parts poor hardware, poor software and poor skills.

Here’s the first 28, check out the whole set here.

Casey, Casey, Casey, Casey…

As seen on Wooster Collective, h/t to Ric.

I’m happy to report that despite a bit of jaundice that we’ve been told should clear up in the next week or so, Casey is doing great. He’s already passed his birth weight (for the non-parents in the crowd, babies — particularly breastfed babies — tend to lose up to 10% of their birth weight in the first few days of life, and it can take 2 weeks for them to regain it).

Maggie’s also recovering perfectly. She’s still a bit slower moving than normal, and not back on the yoga mat yet, but improving every day. She’s also taking to motherhood amazingly — it’s a whole side of my wife I have never seen before and I’m loving it.

We stayed in the hospital for the entire allotted 6 days, with me only popping home once to drop off a few things and grab a car seat from our friends (thanks R&G!).

It’s funny that nearly a week sleeping on a bit-too-short/bit-too-lumpy sofa hasn’t left a stronger impression on me, but the whole time in the hospital is a complete blur. In the beginning I wasn’t eager to spend so much time there, but looking back on it I couldn’t be more appreciative of it. The stay gave Maggie and I a chance to get our heads around this whole “caring for another life” thing with the support of a handful of doctors, a mid-wife and a small army of nurses.

For posterity’s sake, here are a few of the more memorable moments:

The Birth of Our Son

Sort of a no-brainer that this would be the biggest memory of the week. I touched on it last post, but spending those first few moments of my son’s life, just the two of us in a room together, is a memory I’ll treasure for a lifetime.

Doodie Duty

With Maggie bed-bound, everything but feeding Casey fell on me, and I loved it. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but spending 144 hours in a small room is a bit boring. Having lots to do helped that time fly by. I had been warned about the meconium poops months ago by a friend, but nothing can really prepare you for that sticky tar-like goo.

Being quite hands on right from the get go helped with a concern I had about feeling a bit left out. I mean, Maggie had carried Casey for 9 months and was his sole source of much-needed sustenance — I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t have a place in that. It might have been the messy end of the stick, but it really made me feel a part of it all, and poo on the hand is much easier to cope with than chapped nipples.

The Dark Crystals

It is perhaps indicative that the following is the longest memory of the bunch — but despite word-weight, rest assured that these memories are in descending order.

Late in the 2nd day Casey still hadn’t peed, which is not all that uncommon for breastfed babies who are really only consuming colostrum for the first few days before the transitional milk comes in. When he finally did let it out he had dark orange (brick-coloured) crystals in his diaper.

Informing the nurses and doctor about this set into motion a rather goofy string of antics that involved putting a poorly-designed urine capture device over my boy’s baby junk in hopes of catching enough to send to the lab. Because colostrum is a laxative, and contains very little liquid, he was pooping a lot more than peeing at this point, and every time I’d go to change his diaper, what little pee had collected would quickly dump out. After three attempts over a 24-hour period, I calmly explained to the nurse attempting to affix the thing for the fourth time that this just wasn’t working and we needed a better solution.

Apparently parents aren’t meant to raise questions about the care their child is receiving, as the nurse left quickly and sent in the senior nurse on duty, who did nothing to listen to our complaints of the adhesive annoying our newborn, and the spilled urine creating a risk of skin irritation. She insisted that we needed to do this because we had to collect his urine and make sure the stuff wasn’t blood.

I approach saying what I’m about to say next with a bit of apprehension, as I don’t want to be one of those people, but a quick search of the Internet explained that the orange substance was simply urate crystals and nothing to be overly concerned about as they would likely clear out as soon as the baby started getting on a more liquid diet.

Now I’m not saying the nurses and doctor weren’t aware of this, but they certainly did nothing to illustrate this or even hint at the possibility to Maggie and I. Rather, they continued to scare us with exclamations of the possibility that it was blood in the urine (it looked nothing like blood).

Their out-of-the-box suggestion to my foot-down refusal to stick another plastic bag to Casey’s bits was to give us a small plastic cup. Their idea was to have us strip him down and wait until he spout like a fountain and then attempt to catch it — remember, he was relieving himself at most twice a day at this point.

Finally a nurse came in and suggested we do what we’d seen a thousand Chinese parents on the street do with their kid — the bathroom equivalent of holding him over the curb. Not wanting to ostracize ourselves any further with our primary caregivers, we took him into the bathroom and held him over the sink — careful to relocate the toothbrushes (just in case). With me holding Casey’s legs up against his chest and us joking that this was never going to work, we were taken by surprise when suddenly piss was going everywhere. Doubled over with laughter at the waterworks, Maggie scrambled to grab and fill the little plastic cup before the well ran dry. Seeing opportunity to add additional humour to the moment, Casey chose to complete the set and seal the memory with an explosive Number Two all over the sink.

But we got the goods — test performed — urate crystals. A bit of patience and a tiny bit of water with each feeding and it was cleared up 24 hours later.

There were so many more little memories of those first days that combine to create the experience in my mind, but I’m finding it incredibly difficult to figure a way to string them together into sentences. An endless stream of small moments that when I look at individually couldn’t possibly be considered amazing to anyone other than myself and Maggie. But then, I guess that’s what parenthood is, being in a continual state of absolute amazement at the incredible wonder that is by definition a completely average and basic action. I look at Casey and am just blown away by him; by every little move he makes, look he gives — and then I realize that every parent must feel this way when they look at their kid — I had no idea.

More Photos!

And a Video!

[flashvideo file=http://www.ryan-mclaughlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Casey's%20First%20Week%20-%20Small.mp4 /]

Maggie, Button and I spent most of the afternoon with our good friends, and about 1.3 billion others, down at the nearby lake. Between our big dog and their beautiful baby with big bright blue eyes, we grabbed a bit of attention — somewhat of a rarity in the expat-saturated neighbourhood we live in.

Aside from a nice stroll outside yesterday, I also finally got around to taking some pregnancy photos of Maggie. We’ve been talking about doing them for ages, but it always seemed to slip deeper down the “todo” list. However, about to hit week #35, the pressure to get it done or risk never having them gave us the kick in the pants we needed.

Having ventured out a few times now to check out our local maternity- and baby-goods buying options, I’ve seen no shortage of studios offering to take the photos for us. And while I’m sure they would have done a much better job than myself, the thinness of my wallet wouldn’t allow it. That said, I’m pretty happy with what we managed to take. As is Maggie, the proof being that she’s letting me share them

To tide things over, here are a few photos from our trip that I shot with an eye towards converting them to High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. HDR photography is a method of processing images to “accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows [thank you Wikipedia].”

The Drum Tower in central Xi'an.

An HDR image of the Xi'an Bell Tower. You can just see the Drum Tower in the background.

Xi'an Bell Tower at Night

An HDR image of one of the many temples in the Forbidden City, Beijing, China.

Mutianyu Great Wall

A temple in Jingshan Park on a hazy Beijing morning.

I love HDR images — well good ones at least (it’s pretty easy to get carried away). However, I’ve met more than a few photographers that feel HDR (or anything but the most minimal image editing) is blasphemy in the photography world. Perhaps it is because I’m a graphic designer, but bunk I say.

If photography is the exercise of trying to capture the truest representation of light, and cameras by their very design are only able to make a single decision for exposure and stick with it when the shutter is opened, then HDR seems — to me — to allow a photographer a method to step closer to that loftiest of lofty photography goals.

Fantastic photographers have a wealth and breadth of hard-earned skill — this cannot be argued. The learning curve for good photography is steep and can be unforgiving. Perhaps this is why a few of them are so eager to dismiss the use of technology to improve their images. They worked hard to get the abilities to get those perfect photos the first time and damn if some $99 software package can now make some half-rate’s photos pretty good. But I maintain that technology is merely a tool, and should not be faulted or shunned because of its perceived threat to a profession.

I *think* most HDR detractors are the same folks that were saying that they’d never switch from film to digital because digital will NEVER (ever, never, ever) obtain the quality of film, which it arguably has (alright large-format guys, I’m open, hit me). I also *think* most feel that using any sort of digital image manipulation software is “cheating”. This is where I disagree most. Unless you are drawing in extra lines, the photo is still the photo. Using software to improve your image is no different than adjusting the aperture/shutter speed/iso/exposure compensation settings on your camera. What’s more, your camera uses many of the same software techniques (white balance, histograms, image stablization, sharpening, etc.) to digitally manipulate the image behind the scenes. And all of this can be taken one step further back to being creative with dark room practices of burning, dodging and exposure/chemical bath times.

But then I mostly see photography as an art form, a method of expression, by any means. Whether a photographer does that with or without digital image manipulation is no different to me than whether a painter uses water colours or acrilics.