Baby Z

Gili gave birth to a healthy and very cute baby boy at Sunnybrook Hospital at 3:05am on Friday, November 25th. The labour was an intense and amazing experience, and i'm happy I was able to be there with Gili throughout, espcially during some dificult moments. 

Gili went into active labour at around 5pm on Thursday, after we went for a walk at Cedarvale Park. The midwife came around eight in the evening, and by nine we headed to the hospital. The room had a jacuzzi, and Gili was in the water for at least two hours, during some of the strongest contractions. At around 1am the midwife broke the bag of water, and shortly after, Gili started pushing. The baby came out after about an hour and a half of intense pushing. Gili did an incredible job managing her pain without drugs through the whole process. Even having witnessed it, I cannot really fathom nor understand the kind of pain that women go through during labour, and I'm very proud of Gili for doing it! Nadia, our midwife, and Bella, Gili's mom, also gave her amazing support. Since both baby and mother were doing well, we headed home about three hours after the birth. 

I am very excited to be a dad, with all the challenges and rewards that my new role entails. I will share more of my experiences with baby in the coming weeks, months and years.

For now, here are a few images of 5 hour-old baby Z. Enjoy!

Movember

My brother Lavi is raising money and awareness about prostate cancer this Movember. There is only one week to go, so if you find yourselves enjoying his facial expressions and you'd like to help him reach his goal of 2,000,000 CAD, you can donate to this important cause RIGHT HERE.

Thank you!

Flores!

I bought some flowers for my wife on Friday (something that I should do more often), and decided to take a few shots. Enjoy!

Just Do It

Let's hope I don't get sued for this one...

Smoke

My good friend Yaniv Hason, who is a very good photographer (check out his website!), lent me his lighting equipment for a few days, so I get to play around and experiment with ways of shooting that I am not usually able to. I set up the lights and the background in my living room, which no longer resembles one, and shot some incense smoke as my first assignment. As you can imagine, the results are random and unpredictable. Here is one image that stood out for me.

Connect With Your Baby

I admit it. I've been wanting to stick a USB Key in my wife's belly button for a while now.  I'm glad I waited until now, because we just got a new ikea futon with this nice dark red cover to use as a background for this shot. I was going to use the text: 'Baby 2.0', but Gili came up with this much better tag line. I think this might be the beginning of a new belly-series, so stay tuned...

If you like it, leave a comment and share this post with others. Thank You!

Toronto Panorama

I realize that this blog format is not all that effective for displaying panoramas, but I'm sharing this one anyways. It is made out of 18(!) images, and has managed to bring the new photoshop CS5 and my new iMac to a halt a number of times, which frustrated me to no end. I ended up doing all the adjustments in Adobe Lightroom, and only used photoshop to export this jpeg, which is 5 percent of the original image size, and 50 percent of it's quality.  The original is about 8 feet in length, and would make for a really awsome picture on our living room wall at home, if I ever get around to printing and framing it, which would be rather costly.

Enjoy!

Nuit Blanche 2011 in Black and White

Here are a few shots I took last night on Queen Street West during Toronto's annual Nuit Blanche. Enjoy!

Kensington Pedestrian Sunday

I took a few shots during a stroll with my wife at Kensington Market last Sunday. The streets were closed for cars and there were many people walking around, enjoying the sunny weather, listening to music and snacking on street meat. One of the first things you notice if you carry a camera, is that almost everybody else carries one as well. So I decided to document some photographers in action. Why not?

One of the many areas in which I would like to improve as a photographer is in capturing candid shots of people on the street. I get pretty uncomfortable aiming the camera at strangers and shooting without them realizing it. Apparently, the only way to get over that fear is to just do it, so here's a hesitant start. Enjoy!

I don't remember what they were looking at, but they are totally engrossed 

Contact Dancers doing their thing

Any ideas for a funny caption?

Foggy Morning in Quebec

Here Are a few shots I took in Quebec on Saturday Morning. Enjoy!

A Little Bit of Nature

Well, I haven't updated this blog for a long time for no particular reason, so here are some colourful nature shots I took while spending Labour Day weekend at a cottage with my wife and some wonderful friends. I didn't retouch any of these, so the three images with the 'special' effects you see here were made with long shutter speeds and camera movements.  Try it at home!

cat walking away

I really like this image. What I like about it is the determined expression on the cat's face and the decision to walk away from its human pursuer (who happens to be Gili, my wife). The cat is asserting its will, so to speak. Or maybe it is just behaving like a cat, and I'm reading too much into it. At any rate, enjoy!

Gili

As we were driving down towards Finger Lakes, NY, we passed this field that was full with bails of hay, and so I had to stop the car on the side of the road, and photograph the scene. If I give up on opportunities like this, they tend to stay with me for a while and I feel bad for not capitalizing on them. Gili joined me after a few minutes, and I took a few shots of her. She is now over five months pregnant, and we are expecting our first child at the end of November, which is very exciting.