Plus a Day

Those of you who've been following along for the last couple years on my Flickr stream or my Tumblr blog (also available here, know that my son Trajan is a pretty frequent target of my cameras. He's quite the growing concern and full of surprises since day one which was, of course, 13 weeks earlier than expected!

This series of portraits taken mostly on the monthly anniversary of the day after my son Trajan's birth follows his progression from birth, at only 26 weeks gestation and 930 grams to the day after his second birthday.

Our 118 day stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at BC Women's Hospital seems a lifetime ago now. I can't quite comprehend just how tiny he was at one point myself anymore. Now, he's a strapping lad who's up for anything. Just yesterday, we walked all the way from Granville and Broadway to home, with several detours and stops along the way. That's about 7 kilometers altogether. He made it all but the last few blocks when Dad had to carry him, sound asleep, through the hustle and bustle of Downtown Vancouver on a Friday afternoon!

When I was waiting to go in the delivery room for Trajan's birth, it quite suddenly occurred to me that W. Eugene Smith's most famous photograph was not the iconic Dewey Defeats Truman shot nor the raging battles of Iwo Jima. It was not from the Spanish Village series, the Country Doctor nor from his opus on Pittsburgh but, rather, a photo of his children playing in the garden. Since that moment, I have focused my camera on the world immediately around me instead of exotic vistas.

Not that I'd every suggest for a second that my work stacks up to anything Eugene Smith did on even a bad day!