Daisy to the rescue...

This is an emergency blip - I have spend all day, yes all day, editing the photos I took yesterday, and so I only wandered outside briefly to take a photo of this daisy growing in our lawn! I don't know how the pros cope when they have shoots every day, I suppose they have to edit their photos all night. Although the pro taking our course yesterday showed us how she uses purchased Photoshop actions to edit, so it is a case of pushing a button and letting the computer whir away. I ended up buying some of those same Photoshop plug in actions today from Little Lusker if anyone is interested in having a look at them, but not the whole bundle.

I loved the shoot yesterday, although thinking about it today I felt that having 12 of us on the course was a bit too many as you could not always direct the children, as no sooner had you asked the model to look at you when someone else was asking them to look at them instead, and the poor kids did not know where to look! As a result I don't have many photos of them looking directly at me. We were advised to shoot on auto focus which I never do for portraits - I like to manually focus to make sure I have the eye perfectly in focus - and as I was mainly using my 85mm lens at f/2, I was disappointed to see nearly that half my shots were too poorly focused for my liking. Its a tricky lens to use and only when I used it in manual focus were my shots in focus.

And a common gripe...on so many of these courses or workshops the pro is so busy taking their own photos that they do not give you any advice at all. But I viewed it as a great opportunity to photograph some beautiful models (instead of my boys!) and for that alone the fee was worth it as I imagine to hire these models could be expensive. I need to find friends with beautiful young children....now that's an idea!

If you are interested I have put up a few photos on flickr of the child portraits from yesterday.