Photo shoot

So yesterday I decided to dress the kids up and take them outside to try and get some good photos. There's a grouping of pictures on our wall from when Amelia was 3, Shannon was 2, and Avery was 4 months old. I have been thinking for some time, at least a year and a half, that it's time to replace them. Since I bought my fancy camera I figured there would never again be a reason to go to a studio and pay lots of money for pictures. I will probably still do that at some point. I'm deathly afraid to take my camera off of the automatic setting, and I don't have any good editing software to make okay pictures look awesome. Or bad pictures look okay. So, no skill + no software = trip to the photography studio one of these days. In the back of my mind I think my next self-help venture will be a photography class or seven. In the meantime I plan to purchase myself a copy of Digital Photography For Dummies. There's a used copy on Amazon for 44 cents. I saw it yesterday. (Must be really great!)

Anyway, here's a sampling of what I got. If anyone out there has some good editing software and wants to have me over to play with it, let me know. I'll also take recommendations for a quality place to have some photos printed. The ones I've always gotten back from Rite Aid have colors about 27 1/2 shades off, give or take.




The kids were trying hard not to drop Elizabeth. She was bouncing up and down a lot.

Classic Avery face.


You can tell the sun was coming and going. I'm not sure any editing software could get rid of the shadows.

Sun's out!

At this point I decided to move Avery to the other side. He kept sticking his tongue out, so I got onto him for continuing to disobey me.

He didn't like that.

So while he pulled himself together, I took a few of Shannon.



Wonder what he's thinking...



Then it was Amelia's turn.

Amelia's at the age where she smiles weird for the camera. She's beyond the usual tricks that work to make little kids laugh too, like the classic make something fall off mommy's head trick, or the loud, "ACHOOO!!!" trick.

That's a little better.

Huh?

The following pictures of Avery are a pretty well represent him in real life. If you haven't spent a day with Avery you'll see what we're dealing with here.



Making evil plans.

Heh, heh, heh...

You da man!

I'm going to throw this invisible piece of trash at you now.





And last- and least, in age and size anyway- Elizabeth. She was a lot more interested in picking leaves and sticks up out of the grass than smiling for the camera.





This one is just plain funny. She was babbling something and she likes to make this face when she's practing her "d" sound.

"What, it's an effort to lift these cheeks to smile."



Everyone was pretty much done by this time, except me! I reasoned that surely I'd get ONE good shot out of the 100 I took. Just keep shooting...

By this time I was thinking I would like some of that software where you can move heads around to make one good picture. Just one! All I need is one!

And it goes downhill from here.

Elizabeth remains ignorant of the mayhem around her.



So when you've got cranky, uncooperative children, move 'em to a different spot, I always say!

Besides, I wanted a picture of them in the daffodils. They are beautiful right now.

An expertly framed shot.


I don't feel like I ever got THE picture of the four of them I was hoping to get, but the odds of getting four kids five and under to all look at the camera and smile perfectly are pretty darned small...expert or not.