Photo Backlog - A - July 2015

I need to go through my all of my old photos and start posting them. While there are a few Halloween posts left, I wanted to make sure to get an A post into July. This is her birth month, so I wanted to show off some of my first photos of her after I got my first starter DSLR (a Canon EOS Rebel T5). These photos were for a photography class I took in July that year.

I may have mentioned it in a post previously, I'm not sure, but part of my renewed engagement with photography is born of spite. When A was 4 and C was about 9 months or so, I asked for a DSLR for Mother's Day. I'd loved photography and the darkroom in high school, but had lost my Pentax at some point over the years. J's response was something akin to, "Why, you'll never use it." So I did what a normal person does - to prove him wrong, I took multiple classes, took lots of photos, started a small business until I could pay off not only two new cameras but two laptops (and more), and started entering photo contests. I didn't tell him this until about two years ago, I just hid it and let the need to spite his comments drive me. I'm clearly very emotionally healthy.

Anyway - so yeah, I started doing the photography classes at our nearby gardens (I don't think they offer them anymore). I took classes on beginner and intermediate levels, Lightroom editing, flash photography, and a couple others that I've since forgotten. The assignments were on basic portraiture, contrast, etc., and so A was a great model for these early ones. Please keep in mind that I was just learning how to not just camp out in auto mode, and what everything controlled, so they are not super sophisticated or anything.

This is likely one of my favorite photos of A from this era. She is just so stinking cute. It's a little soft on her eyes, is the only thing I'd change. I could probably fix that in editing these days.

We usually kept the curtains in A's room closed when she napped, but didn't this day. She had the best cheeks and skin!

On the cusp of turning 5

One of her favorite activities