Deceptively Delicious

There's no phrase that make you sound more like your parents than when you hear "Eat your vegetables!" being uttered from your lips :p Obviously directed at your own children. I have all but totally given up on Kayden's meals till I happened to watch an episode of Oprah where this book Deceptively Delicious by my favourite comedian's wife, Jessica Seinfeld, was featured. It uses the simple tactic of hiding the goodness of veggies into foods kids love in the form of purees. She cleverly mixes the right vegtables with the right type of food so that even the most discerning little eaters will not be suspicious.

Some winning recipes include:

Macaroni and Cheese with Butternut Squash or Cauliflower


Chocolate Cake with Beetroot


For the sweet toothed, there's even Brownies with Carrots and Spinach! Really cool!

After the show, I rushed to Borders to get it but they said it's out of stock...obviously! I'm sure all the other mothers who like me have struggled to get their kids to eat right have rushed out to get the book before me! It must have been a rerun I was watching :p Finally I got my hands on the book last week but have yet to try out the recipes. Will do so this week and post some of the winning recipes with reports of how they went with my white-rice-green-noodles-bread-eating-toddler :p

I think Jessica sums it up best in her book introduction:
"All we want is to make simple, fast, nutritious meals that our kids will actually eat. But after just one experience of watching a child throw our best efforts onto the floor, or refuse to eat, we just want to give up. Who has that kind of time - and food - to waste?"

*NODS*

It's Summer time!

Back in September, Ashley and I shot an outdoor session with a little girl named Summer. This is actually Summer's second shoot with The Studio Loft.

We met Summer's parents during the Motherhood Fair in 2007. Her dad was totally in love with the canvas we displayed at our booth of Candida's son St John jumping from a chair. It was a seamless collage of a few jumping positions SJ did in the studio when he was 2 years old. He signed up for a studio session with us just to try and get the same shots done. It was unsuccessful :p Summer refused to jump.

One year on, her parents decided to go for an outdoor session. Here are some shots from the session and some spreads from her coffeetable album.

Trying out a new effect which is dominant throughout the album:


This is the album cover:










After the shoot, we adjourned to the studio to try the jumping shots again and hurray! She got it this time :) Here's the final jumping collage which was printed into a 1 meter long canvas.

Rudolf has a friend

Yesterday was the first of our 3 dates for the Christmas Walk In special. Our favourite shot from the day was little Isaac with our reindeer Rudolf :)

Princess Marla

Princess Marla is all of 13 days old today. Her parents brought her in for a newborn shoot and I got to try her out on THE chair :) She looks better in it than my chubbster Dylan kekeke

Tough to be charitable

Last week I posted details of our Christmas promo and the very next day I thought why not increase the price from $25 to $28 and contribute the $3 to charity? So I contacted the Children's Cancer Foundation to make some enquiries on how I should go about doing this. I was referred to 3 persons before I was able to speak to someone about making a contribution. A nice lady Yenni spoke to me and she said if I put it like that, it will be considered as fund raising and a permit and auditing will be required amounting to about $500! So she suggested:

1. The Loft just mention that the studio will be supporting CCF for this Christmas and hoping to raise some funds (or fix an amount) for CCF and encourage the customers participation by donating a voluntary amount to make this event successful.

2. Sponsorship in kind, the studio can give free photo shoots for their beneficiaries say for 3 or 5 of them? They will select those born in December or else those from low income family, etc.

I decided to go with her second suggestion and I revised the promo flyer to include their logo and mentioned that the studio will be donating a part of the proceeds from the promo to the charity in the form of 3 x Little Big Shots packages. Then I emailed them for approval but received a call from Yenni's colleague to say that the first suggestion by Yenni actually requires a permit, that we are not allowed to mention "a part of the proceeds will go to blah blah blah" and also cannot mention "do your bit for charity" as this will again be insinuating that it's a fund raising activity thus requiring the permit and auditing :s Also he said I cannot use their logo... Sigh, so much red tape just to donate to charity, it makes me wonder why they make it so difficult for people to give them money. Then he explained that it was because of the NKF saga...

Anyway, he said if I can just donate to them without mentioning it in the promo flyer that will be good and will not require permit or auditing. So my bit for charity this Christmas will be a donation of 3 x Little Big Shots packages to 3 children from the CCF :) I can't wait to meet them all soon!

The Intern and The Chair

Yesterday The Studio Loft welcomed it's first intern! She is Hitomi from NAFA. Into her final year majoring in photography, Hitomi likes to shoot still life and is inspired by the works of Takashi Yasumura and Rebecca Sittler. She explains that they photograph objects in places where they are not usually found, eg. some marshmellows tumbling down a pillow on a bed. Interesting :)

During lunch time, we went to my friend Corinne's office which is a street away to collect this victorian looking chair she's loaning me for use as a studio prop. Wanted to take some shots of Dylan wearing just a bow tie sitting on the chair but my mother-in-law kept nagging that he's still not well and so here are the shots of him sitting on the chair in his pajamas :p

Christmas came early

Christmas came early for me this year, Dylan my cutie pie was my present in June :D Another early Christmas present is Kayden's social skills improvement :) Both these "gifts" are priceless and I treasure both my boys dearly. *MUAK!*

Earlier I posted some photos we took of Dylan for our Christmas Walk In promotion. On Saturday after his outing with Gong Gong, Kayden dropped by the studio and we managed to get some shots of him as well. Too bad we couldn't get a nice shot of both brothers together, it was a total nightmare trying to do so!

Anyway here are some of the pictures, you can view the full set on my Facebook.

I may be slightly biased, but isn't this the cutest Santa ever! :p


What do you mean there's nothing in them?


Doesn't he look like a mischievous elf here?


Can I have this one mummy?


My first Christmas tree!


Do I look like Santa?!?


RAAAH!

Christmas Walk In

Ho ho ho everyone! We are having a Christmas special as you may have already heard. Here are the details of the promotion, click on the picture to see bigger. Do spread the word :) I'll post the photos which we took for this promo in another post.

Char's Birthday

Today is Charlene's 20th birthday!!! We celebrated last Wednesday at Ding Tai Fung Paragon. Then we bought a Christmas tree from Metro and it took the 3 of us more than an hour to decorate it. Ta dah!!!


Here's wishing you a very happy birthday Charlene, may all your wishes come true and fats never be in your body! hehehe :)
(I should post the DO NOT FEED picture of you from our crew shoot here!)



Ashley jie jie who's on leave this whole month came to visit Dylan boy, think she must have missed him to bits la!








Char likes this shot taken by Ashley becoz she looks slim in it :p


This shot taken by my mother in law hehehe