I Need Practice, but I love it

here's the first picture out of my camera. It was late, and I just had it on auto, but it's still fun.
The 2nd picture:

Snap shots I could have taken with my other camera probably better b/c I'm not used to this one yet.

This one is funny to me. I've been pretty lucky that my kids don't mind me taking pictures. They were all sitting watching Sesame Street. They never all sit in one place like this, so I turned back around out of the room to grab my camera. The funny thing is, that Dylan knows that turn-about I did and called to me "Don't Take Our Pic-tu, Mom." So I waited a while then snuck around the corner and zoomed in. I've always heard that photographer's kids run from the camera. I'm no photographer, but how is it that once I get a "real" camera, the first chance of daylight, Dylan requests his privacy? I love it, maybe I will be a photographer some day. I'm NOT going to be one of those people who think that as soon as they get a good camera they can start charging people and calling themselves a photographer. I would love practice though, so if you can find babysitting for me, I'll play with my camera. I'm not going to take it to the beach though - ever. I know that sand gets in everything no matter how hard I would try to be careful. Just so you know:)

Malia is in her swimsuit waiting for me to put Noah to bed so we can swim. Dylan took his shirt off so he could wrestle one of the other 3, and I must have changed Isaac's diaper and gave up chasing him to put his clothes back on. My boys were ready to get swimsuits on soon, so maybe that's my excuse for not having them dressed. Anyway, again, it's just a snap shot that I could have taken with my waterproof camera, but I needed to start somewhere.

Instead of dressing the kids up in cute clothes for a photo shoot, I waited 'til they were all asleep. Yes, they were ALL FOUR ASLEEP! I was so tired and wanted to nap too, but was excited to read through my camera manual a little more so I settled on the couch with it and my water bottle. I was laying back and played with some of the settings in my manual for the first time. Isn't it cool?

Not worth printing or even posting except for the fact that it was my first time using the manual settings.
And this is my 2nd time. I had all 4 kids again today but wanted to capture their "water park."

Did you see it? I tried opening up my aperture and had the lowest F-stop number and still didn't get much better than this black picture. They were all 4 laughing, take my word for it.
So I upped my ISO to the highest it would go but still didn't get what I wanted. Then I made the shutter speed go way slow, knowing that the kids would be blurry. The picture wasn't black any more, but I still couldn't see my Dylan. He's too fast.

I kept playing around with the settings just to experiment, but the kids found something else to do.

The reason Dylan calls it a "water park" is probably because where we went for my birthday. He's making big water slides out of the couch cushions even though he was only brave enough to go on the froggy slide. (Visit us, Abbey!)

The funny thing, is that he pounces from one to another (and on the coffee table and couch arm rests etc) trying to escape the alligators or sharks (depending on what kind of water/carpet it is for the day.) I love it b/c that's exactly what I used to do with my siblings. Seriously, we would jump from fire place to the big blue chair to the couch then we'd walk the plank (piano bench) and hopefully someone would throw us a life saver - a couch cushion so we wouldn't get eaten by the sharks. We would try to walk through out whole house not touching the carpet by scaling the window sills in the hallway too. If there was an area that was too far to climb on existing furniture, we would use the couch cushions.

Anyway, back to my practicing:
Not blurry, but too dark, and a shark is about to bite his toes.

Better, but not focused and they're headed up the stairs. (And I really need to order a larger print of something to go on that wall, or two frames at least. That's really bothering me - above Prickly Pete.)

I finally turned it back to auto to see what the camera thought I should be doing. It wanted a flash. That's the thing I didn't want. And by that time, the kids had found something else to do, so I still didn't see them in the frame.

It was a good first lesson on child photography though:)

I already want a camera with a higher ISO, and a lens protector/filter, an extra battery, etc. I know why it's tempting to charge people for even starting out with photography. This could get expensive, so I'll just stick to what I have, knowing how incredibly blessed I am to have more than one working camera and fun kids to mess up my house and bring back childhood memories.