Only Little Once Photography Class

We love our newborn photographer, in case you missed all of my gushing about her approximately 7.5 months ago. She offered a photograph course entitled, "Only Little Once", specifically geared towards parents taking pictures of their children. I immediately asked JB if I could take this course, despite my fears of having never left my breast-fed-only baby for more than 3 hours at a stretch.  A friend from church also signed up for this course and we figured there would be 8-10 people in it. But, we were pleasantly surprised to have 4 women in our class. What a treat with all the personal attention and help with figuring out our cameras!

We met for 2 hours of class at Moka, an amazing coffee shop in Virginia Beach (check it out if you have never been there...it's amazing).  It was actually really nice to be back in a class environment after being out of work for almost 9 months.  We learned all about the Triangle of functions in photography: f stop, ISO and shutter speed. We talked about bokeh (aka the pretty blur in good photos) and white balance. It was like learning a new language of words that I had seen on the buttons on my camera but I had absolutely no clue what they meant! 

We all went to the Chesapeake Arboretum following class and photographed our children. Many thanks to Jenny for lending me her adorable girls since my kids were tied up with family vacation/bedtime at the beach. Here are some of my favorites from the first day and practicing later that week! 

Sisters

We shoot with a 50mm lens which Jonathan loves and I have always found takes really really orange pictures. The timeshare has lots of oranges in it, so it was amazing to see how this picture wasn't scary Halloween orange. i'm still learning how to play with where my subject is to get the best lighting but it's so fun to figure out the puzzle of how to get a good picture! 

We went out to the beach last night to play some baseball and I thought it would be a good chance to practice shooting. I cranked up the shutter speed to 1600 and was able to get these crisp action shots of Jackson. No more blurry arms or faces!

Many many thanks to Erin. We love the photos you took of our family when Rachel was born. You teach an amazing class that is easy to understand and accessible for people like me who have a nice camera but have absolutely.no.idea. what to do with it! I feel excited to continue learning about my camera and getting some great pictures of the kids.