My husband hates to take pictures. My oldest daughter is great at it and usually doesn’t mind, but it really isn’t her thing, either. The teenage boys? Forget about it! So, if I want my family to remember in years to come that I actually existed, I’ve got to get in front of the camera more! I own a tripod and a remote so there really is no reason not to. Easy peasy, right?

Ummm… I’m finding it a bit more difficult that I originally thought.

A few days ago my husband took most of my children to their first day of homeschool co-op.

Since they were going to the library and homeschool pe after co-op, I had over five hours to myself. Well, sort of. I still had a 6 week old baby home with me so my time wasn’t really my own. But I had small blocks to do with as I would.

During one of these blocks, I got the tripod set up. I discovered the batteries were dead in one of the remote pieces, so I replaced those. Then I started trying to figure out where I should sit with the baby. I got a lot of pictures like this:

Then I wanted to mimic me in the picture. I wanted to make it easy for when baby woke up. This is where I ran into trouble. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but the remote only wanted to work if I was standing behind or beside the camera. Whenever I sat down in front of the camera and pointed behind me, it wouldn’t take the shot. It was so frustrating!! Occasionallly it worked. But I never could pinpoint why. I got shots like this:

During this time, baby was snoozing peacefully in his bassinet.

I tried a few shots when he woke up before changing his clothes. But again, the remote was inconsistent. 🙁

And baby got mad…

At this point, I was frustrated, too, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t even bother to try hiding the remote.

I waited until baby was a little happier and went ahead and changed his clothes. I decided to just hit the trigger as much as possible while I changed him in hopes of getting something.

Then he got mad again. But at least he’s in focus, right?

Here’s my favorite shot:

I’m anxious to try again, but now that school has started back my time to practice photography is limited. I’ll do what I can when I can!! I’m taking an Intro to Natural Light class with clickinmoms.com so that will push me to keep photography in my schedule.

I think I wore baby out with all the getting up and down off the floor trying to figure out what was wrong with the remote. He went sound asleep after we were done. 🙂

Thanks for stopping by! Posting is hit and miss for now but I’ll post when I can. I’m still keeping up with the 365 project. I’m just not blogging about it. You can find my project at http://365project.org/abesfolks.