The press release from Aiken's camp following the birth of his son was obnoxious! Aiken proudly claimed that his son had ONE last name, not two. Yeah, god forbid Mama have any claim on the kid in the form of a last name.

It just proves that even in new and non-traditional types of families, men do so love to cling to one last tradition - patriarchy. Egh!

well, there are rumors Ricky Martin is gay too and he didn't have a romantic relationship with the mother of his baby. She was a surrogate, you know that, right?

anyway good for Clay, now he doesm't have to be ashamed anymore.

Here's a story for the "No, Duh" section of the paper.

I mean, good that he finally came out. I just wish it didn't have to be such a big deal.

Can we please not call her the birth mother? She is the mother, full stop.

h20_girl, I think the point of "birth mother" there was because Miriam was drawing a distinction between the co-parenting mother of the child Aiken fathered and the birth mother (i.e. the woman who bore but is not parenting the child) of Ricky Martin's kid. They are both biological moms, but only one is parenting. I don't think any offense was meant.

Unless of course you object to the utterly useful phrase "birth mother" in any usage, in which case, feel free to disregard my comment.

Danyell: Agreed. As I wrote on my own post about this, I really look forward to a day when someone's sexual orientation will be respected so much that it is completely left alone. I have to hope that eventually it will be a non-issue, that people won't even understand why we ever cared about who someone wants to be with.

An interesting road to an interesting family arrangement. I hope it works out.

You might be able to write your own rules for creating your pieces, but there are real, outside, "other" rules for doll photography. And you must follow the rules if you want others to appreciate your dolls in books and magazine articles, buy them or invite them to be seen in gallery competitions. You must.

A photograph is a tool. It is not the real thing. But it has to be as close to the real thing as possible. It cannot leave room for the viewer's mind to fill in the blanks. It cannot show more in the picture than is really part of the piece. That's cheating. Therefore, the first rule of photography is: Nothing is in the picture that does not belong to the piece. Don't take pictures in the garden with flowers; don't take pictures on the coffee table with candy dishes and doilies; and don't take pictures against your upholstered furniture, draperies, or outside against walls or decks.

Use a solid paper, cardboard, or fabric drape that goes behind and continues under piece. Solid means no wrinkled sheets or fabrics, no bent cardboard or paper, no artful draping of background fabric. It means clean and sharp. If you can take three days and thirty dollars worth of fabric to make a dress for the doll, you can take thirty minutes to press and stretch a fabric or three dollars to buy cardboard or a piece of felt for the photo background.

The only time you might vary from this rule is when you want to style a doll in a setting to make an illustration such as for a storybook or greeting card where the whole picture, not the doll, is the message. The next major consideration is focus. Here the rule is: All parts of the figure from base to top of head and from back to front must be in sharp focus. If the figure looks fuzzy, the viewer might think the surface is that way.
This may mean you have to manually focus, wear your glasses to focus, move back from the figure, and shoot with the camera lens parallel to the figure.