Godzilla!! Best Baby Portrait

Here’s the story behind building this image, almost a year in the making.

About this time last year, my fiance decided to make a really awesome dragon costume for my niece. Pretty cool, right?! She spent the fall making this great outfit for my then 2 year old niece for Halloween. I got this idea that I had to take a photo of her costume Godzilla style, so over the past 8 months, I’ve saved every box I got from B&H Photo. Every time I got a light stand, slider, video lights, or any other kind of large gear, I kept the box to build the city. I spent 8 hours drawing all the windows onto our skyscrapers, and with that, it was time for shooting.

I got to my brothers house and took about an hour to set everything up. It was a bit windy, so used cans inside the boxes to keep them from blowing over. I was looking for a perfect assortment of box heights to really look like a large city, and got them all perfectly placed, set up my strobe and battery pack, and when everything was set, let’s shoot GODZILLA!!

When we went to get my niece into the dragon, she curled up in a ball and said “I’M TIRED”. I know, but do you want to be a dragon? “No.” Do you want to go take a picture? “No.” Can you say Rawr? “…rawr.” Say RAWR. “Rawr.” RAWR. “RAWR.” You’re awesome! Let’s make you a dragon!

My niece has picked up a thing for taking pictures, so she took her pink camera with her, and took some pictures of me making faces at her on set. “I’ll make you a deal. You take a picture of me, then I take a picture of you. Ok?” The result? The darn cutest fiercest baby portrait ever!