Besides, it was an excuse to dress her up in a pretty outfit and play with my camera.
Unfortunately, I waited until after dinner to attempt both activities, which is right around the time that Mia gears up to fall asleep for the night (well, until she gets hungry, that is). As a result, when she grew terribly fussy after her diaper and clothing change, my resultant attempts at soothing her only served to make her sleepy.
I wasn't about to let that stop me, however, after having taken the time to put the silly, frilly pink thing on, so I laid Mia on the loveseat and began to shoot quickly, knowing that I had perhaps two minutes in which to work before she woke up in response to being put down.
I had just enough time to capture the full length of her...
... some precious toes...
... and hands (just look how long and delicate those fingers are!)...
... and her swiftly-changing newborn face.
Having successfully gotten all of those shots in auto with the pop-up flash (to save time), I then got a little braver and began to play around a little bit.
I had a decent amount of light in the room, but all of it was artificial, and none of it was direct. After maxing out the ISO and lowering the shutter speed to 15 to compensate, I found that I still had to contend with the poor quality. My first few attempts came out tinted a sickly yellow, like this one:
It was then that I had a sudden epiphany about how white balance was supposed to work. Thus, I finally successfully metered in-camera, setting the white balance to Incandescent. This was the result:
Sadly, though Mia stayed nice and still for me, I am terrible at holding a camera still while pressing down the shutter button, so I threw off the focus a bit.
I also wish that I'd had more time to play around with the white balance, since Mia still looks a tad too yellow for my taste. Perhaps the flourescent setting would have been a better choice, given that all of our bulbs are CFL now. But that will be an experiment for another time.
Around the time that I started looking around for my camera bag to grab the mini-tripod, I passed the two-minute mark, and Mia began to stir. Rushing back to get some last-minute shots in, I managed this one, which actually came out in better focus than the one above, despite the fact that it was rushed and taken in the midst of some amount of early wiggling on Mia's part.
Go figure, right?
The one bit I managed to still get out of focus was her feet, since they were sitting so far forward of the rest of her, which got me thinking. If, in the future, I wish to remedy that problem (which I've encountered several times before), how would I go about it? I'm guessing that it would involve an adjustment to the Aperture and/or Autofocus Area Mode. I'm hoping for an opportunity to find out for sure.
I suppose the question that remains is, will I ever find the time? Perhaps, if I take up photographing things that don't move. I don't think my kids will ever qualify, in that regard.
