When baby Darwin was born to my daughter Elissa, my other daughter, Sara, promised to take a photograph of her every week during her first year. Thus the final photograph of that birthday gift, week 52, was taken at Darwin's first birthday party, which Margie and I hosted at our house.

To the left, you can see Aunt Sara shooting a Week 52 candidate. On her first birthday, Darwin posed wearing a pair of rabbit ears, as you can see.

As I've previously noted, it's fascinating to see Darwin experiencing everything for the first time. She wasn't too sure what was going on at her first Halloween, as documented in my blog entry Nine months. A month after Halloween was her First Thanksgiving, and then on Christmas 2013, her first Christmas.

But this entry celebrates Darwin's entire first year, by exhibiting all the photos that comprise Aunt Sara's gift. Here they are, below, one at birth, and then one a week for 52 weeks. I've posted them in a size that's sufficiently large for easy viewing, so you don't have to click on each one to enlarge it, you can just scroll down (although if you want to see a bigger version, you can click on any photo). This makes for a rather long blog entry, but scrolling is cheap.

Birthday	Week 1
Week 2	Week 3

Week 4
 

Week 5

Week 6

Week 7	Week 8
Week 9	Week 10
Week 11	Week 12
Week 13	Week 14
Week 15	Week 16
Week 17	Week 18
Week 19	Week 20
Week 21	Week 22
Week 23	Week 24
Week 25	Week 26
Week 27	Week 28
Week 29	Week 30
Week 31	Week 32
Week 33	Week 34
Week 35	Week 36
Week 37	Week 38
Week 39	Week 40
Week 41	Week 42
Week 43	Week 44
Week 45	Week 46
Week 47	Week 48
Week 49	Week 50
Week 51	Week 52

Like any good photographer, Sara always took several photos at each sitting, and selected the best one to become part of the series. Sometimes she solicited our help in making the selection, by posting a few alternatives in a Dropbox folder, and asking us for our opinions on which one to use.

Some of the photos were taken with Darwin propped up on Elissa and Ryan's couch, but for others, Sara brought along a large piece of cloth to use as a backdrop. In order to be more comparable, Sara didn't use a large variety of settings. I think all of the photos were done using natural light.

In addition, Sara created a short video (2:08) which also documents Darwin's development over her first year. It's called The Weekly Evolution of Darwin, and it was put together out of short videos that Sara took in the course of the photo sessions. You can see it just below: ^Note 1

And to reemphasize the effort that went into this project, below is another short video (3:12) containing some of Sara's outtakes. Sara wrote of it, "For those of you who think it's easy to get all those smiley photos, here's a little 'Behind the Scenes' Christmas video I made for Ryan and Elissa." It's called Baby Wrangling.

Note 1:   If you want to see versions of the videos that are wider than the 600-pixel-wide confines of my blog pages (almost 50% wider), click the next link for The Weekly Evolution of Darwin, or the next link for Baby Wrangling.   [return to text]