Nikon D5000....AKA, Mommy's new toy!!!

I love fancy pictures and would love to be able to take professional looking photos of my kids throughout their life. So, I bought a fancy camera in hopes of learning how to take fancy photos. That apparently was the easy part despite the high price tag of nice cameras. The owners manual is about half an inch thick with 8 pt font and every other word seems to be a term I need to look up before proceeding. So, the journey of learning photography begins!

Here are a few pics I have taken so far. Nothing fancy, just trying out a few of the techniques I am learning.

Picture #1 with the camera

Ok, so it takes sharp pictures, but how do you work the flash on this thing?

Check out the water beads on his forhead!

Pictrure #79

Ok, found the flash!

Super cute picture of Nathan, but he would not hold still so it turned out a bit blurry.

Kids are constantly in motion (no kidding, right?) which makes it incredibly hard to focus and shoot quickly. This is a skill that will only come with time and will hopefully become easier once I learn to use the functions more efficiently.

Here I am trying out the aperture settings on the camera. The goal is to focus on the subject (lens cover) and blurr everything in the foreground and background. The lens cover is a bit fuzzy but I think that was because I was not holding the camera steady enough. That being said, the background and foreground turned out fairly blurry which is exactly the effect I was looking for :)

Here is my attempt at using the above mentioned effect on Natalie. Turned out pretty good! After doing a bit more reading this morning, I have learned that I need a lower f number than what my lens will do...so this is about as blury as I can get with at this point. Still, this is MUCH better than my point and shoot camera would do :)

Same effect on this next shot, but just had to throw it in because she looks so precious :)

I probably won't do much blogging about the photography stuff on the "kids" blog, so if you want to see how I am progressing, check out the "photography blog". You can find a link to the right :)