Photos Photos Everywhere..

On our Los Angeles Arboretum trip extravaganza, I want you to all know, I took 209 photos.  Not even kidding.  209 photos and you've seen most of the best of the bunch.  I've read on other photo blogs like MCP Actions and Simplicity Photography, that photographers (real, live, professional ones who do this for a living) take 300-500 photos in a portrait shoot, and only give 20-30 for their clients to review for purchase.  That's a lot of unused photos.  However, as I take this little adventure into photography, I'm beginning to see why.

As promised, here are some of the bad and ugly shots from that outing.

I confess, I totally cheated on this trip because I wanted to be able to provide our friends with a few decent shots of their kids.  So I used the auto setting on my handy dandy camera.  Unfortunately, that means that it doesn't always focus on what I want it to.  In this instance, my camera thought for some crazy reason that I really wanted a close up photo of all that grass, when really it was the egret in the background that I wanted.  Silly camera.

I was totally in love with the composition of this shot (not to mention the subject.. what a cutie! And please note that he has my camera lens cap in his hot little hands.  This was prior to him donating it to the forest never to be found again.  The rascal.)   Unfortunately, this is another good reason to learn to focus your camera yourself.  He's all out of focus.  I'm not even sure there's anything in this shot that's in focus.  I have no idea what my camera was thinking.  I cried when I saw it close up and realized it was a total loss.  I cried a lot.

You may not be able to tell from this image being so small, but the focus is really soft.  Her face details are all soft and fuzzy and another wonderful photo bites the dust.  Again, I need to really learn how to use my camera and maybe we can avoid these tragedies.

Although, sometimes it's not the camera.  I think it would be nice to blame the camera for all my woes some days.  In this instance, this wonderfully chubby cheeked cutie would not cooperate.  I swear, he would literally do everything in his tiny power to avoid a good shot.  Why? Why don't you like me sweetness?  Why do you have to do me wrong???

In fact, in a fit of pique, my own daughter forsook me (is forsook a word? Do I have that right? Anyone? Anyone?).  She would dash away the moment my camera was pointed in her direction.  You can see the blurry after effects of how fast she was dashing away.  Why don't these kids want their photos taken?  I mean, when I was little, you couldn't keep me from being in front of the camera.  Maybe it was the heat.  Yeah, that must be it.

Then we have shots like this.  Where her hair is all messy, and in her eyes.  And that little bundle of chubby sweetness is all cropped off at the head.  But she's in focus, and quite frankly, this captures her pretty well.  She's sweaty and messy,  tired with just the right amount of pout.  I love this photo.  I shouldn't, but I do.  Sometimes you don't have to be perfect.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder right?

Seriously... Thoughts?

ps. Cooking to come tomorrow.  Our first Armenian dish!  Dolma Casserole - be there or be square!  Did I really just type that? Forgive me.