More practise.

I was running out of volunteers to photograph, so had to cast a wider net.


I found C via on online forum, she wanted some more recent photos of her daughter O.




























This was my first time taking photos of someone I had just met, so I was quite nervous! It was a good learning experience though, and we ended up with some cute photos.

Practise.

The next to let me practise on them, was S and her son B.

I also had a bit of fun putting a compilation of the photos together. It's a nice way to include some of the fun shots, which weren't necessarily "right" on their own.

J also joined us at the practise session,
with her sons O and G.

I didn't do nearly as well with these
photos unfortunately, lots of dark
and/or out of focus shots.

G was a performer though, smiling
and playing up to the camera.

It was time to photograph people.

I finally became bored with photographing the plant life in our garden, and decided to try photographing people. This is trickier, because firstly you have to find people willing to pose, and secondly they have to be patient while you play around with all the settings to work out what you are doing.





Luckily, E & T agreed to pose for me. As I said, it was my first time taking photos of people, other than my kids, so I was pleased with the result. I wasn't entirely happy with my lenses though, and ordered a 50mm 1.8 for a sharper image and to get better photos in low light situations.

I got a new camera. Well an old camera.

I had to return the Canon 400D, so I went in search of my own camera.

I ended up with a second hand Canon 350D, with the twin kit lens (wide angle 18-55 and telephoto 75-300).

Of course I had to take some more photos in the garden for comparison.

Passiflora

Weed (of some sort)

Raindrops on pawpaw leaf

And then it was Christmas. 2008 that is.

I've never been one to give Christmas cards, but everyone around me was busy making them. For the hobby photographer, that meant beautiful photos of their children, with a variety of styles of layouts, backgrounds, fancy text and sweet messages.

I decided I too could show off my children in a festive greeting card, and here's what I came up with.

Editing a photo is a lot of fun too.

Digital photography allows you to get away with less camera skills and clean up your photo later on the computer. I went a little overboard, to see what I could do with my average photos of ordinary things.

Can you guess what these are? The answers are next to each photo, highlight the text to find out.













A = A doorknob.

A = A mop.

A = An aloe-vera plant.

A = My son, playing with a toy fire truck.

DSLR takes much better photos of the kids.

By now my son was 2 years and 7 months old, and it was a struggle getting him to stay still in one place long enough to take photos. And most of the time he was looking down at what he was doing. If I tried getting down on the ground and pointing the camera up, I ended up being tackled by an enthusiastic small child.

So it was my daughter's turn to be in the photos. She is just over 10 months old in this photo. I was very impressed with the difference you get with a DSLR camera. Not just in quality, but also it adds something almost magical - the blur of the background, it all helps you to really see your child. We spend so much time running around in our busy lives, and having these photos helps to recapture those moments, possibly more so than when we experienced them the first time, and were too busy to notice or appreciate it.