Five Months, and Fun with a "New" Camera

Michael turned five months old today.  Not a great day for him, or for me, as days go, unfortunately.  But still one of significance.  He was particularly fussy, and averse to sleep, which made his crankiness pretty hard-core by the end of the day.  I should have known better than to even attempt pictures after dinner, but I did.  And the end result was a few un-usables like this one:

And about thirty straight minutes of crying and screaming that I just couldn't seem to soothe.  So I held him tight and cried along with him until we were both exhausted.

He is finally sleeping in his bassinet upstairs (approximately 60 minutes and counting) and I am left to wonder what tonight will bring.  Will he get a nice block of sleep somewhere in the night to make up for what he missed during the day?  Alas, this is not usually the way with babies- more likely it will be a night of frequent wakings from over-exhaustion.  But the fact that he has stayed down this long is a good sign.  Only time will tell.

Despite the epic failure of my attempted photo shoot, I am glad to have finally tested out my "new" camera.  My sister (who studied photography in college and gathered a bit of a collection of cameras as a result) has graciously passed down to me her old Nikon D40.  Its battery died some time ago, however, so Tom ordered me a new one from Amazon, and it showed up on our doorstep today.  I think this also marked the first package delivery that we've received in our new home that came to the right place the first time.

I'm very excited about this camera, but I can already tell that it's going to be a steep learning curve.  It's digital, but (at least with the special lens attached) appears to require the use of the viewfinder.  I suppose that if I really want to learn true photography, I should start using it anyway, but it was certainly an odd experience having to do so after years of using only digital point-and-shoots.

Tom played around with it a bit, too.  He took this cute shot of Abby, which came out pretty well, but for some reason is a bit grainy.  I'm not sure what settings he was using, though.

Pizza-face!

I do believe, however, that trying to take posed shots of a difficult-to-please-at-times five-month-old is probably not the time to try to figure this thing out.  So, I'm thinking that tomorrow, if Michael will oblige, we'll try again- with my trusty little Panasonic DMC-LX5.  I'll save fancier cameras, and viewfinders, for another day.