A few months before Claire was born, Kyle and I splurged on a nice camera. Previously, our cameras served the sole purpose of capturing whatever stupid/dangerous outdoor adventure we were up to. That way we had evidence that we actually were as stupid as we thought we were and we could bring the photos home to show my mom and make her squirm (that is, when she didn't come along for the stupidity).

Evidence of aforementioned stupidity:

Note the size of trees...bad idea. I'm only half smiling because I'm not-so-secretly terrified.

So once we found out that our future endurance trials would be dealing with sleep deprivation and never ending diaper changes, we decided that we needed something more than the semi-disposable cameras of our past. So we did what all good Americans do and marched to Costco and dropped a ton of money on a camera that we didn't know how to use. This is my confession. Luckily, Kyle is kind of a weirdo and likes to figure out things like camera settings, so we slowly learned to use our camera (Kyle teaching, me following). I'm proud to say that I officially shoot in Manual Mode but I have to admit, it basically took me a year to learn.

Anyone who has the good fortune of being inundated by the masses of Claire pictures I post on my Facebook page, knows that I've been on a photography kick in the past few months. I've been taking a few online and in-person classes and have been bombarding my new found photographer friend and my sister's kind boyfriend with all of my photography questions. My badgering has paid off and I feel like I've learned so much in the past few months. While I'm not planning to open up shop any time in the near future, I do feel like I'm on the path of being a damn good mom-tographer.

My friends and family have been wonderfully encouraging of my new found hobby. Not only are they patient while I relentlessly follow them around with my camera glued to my face and graciously "like" my 1,453 Facebook pictures of Claire in every possibly pose/lighting/outfit, several of them also gave me the photography gear hook-up on my birthday (shout out to Jin's lens/coffee mug).

My sister gifted me a reflector and since I've semi-mastered opening and closing it without looking like a scene from a Jim Carey movie, I decided it was time to take it out and let it see some action. Last night was our monthly "girl's night" with the grandmas, Lauren, Karen, and Jin and we were meeting at Falls Terrace restaurant, next to Tumwater falls. Since the plan was already to have Kyle and Claire drop me off on their way down to visit Grandpa, I threw a cute outfit on the kid and turned it into a mini-photo shoot.

Claire is currently cutting eight teeth right now so we spent the majority of our mini-shoot trying to convince her to take her fingers out of her mouth but here are some of the keepers.

 If you look closely, you can see the reflection of the white circular reflector in her eyes. I've been told that this is a "desirable" effect.

The top that she's wearing is actually supposed to be a 0-3 month dress. It obviously didn't fit her at that age but we've found a good use for it at 15 months.

One of my favorite things about these pictures is that as we were wrapping things up a car full of all of Claire's grandmas drove by honking (they were pretty excited to see the Little Red). They whipped around, pulled into the park exit (and were scolded by the security guard) and came out for a quick visit before dinner. Since everyone was dressed up and looking good and we happened to already be at a locale that area photographer seek out, I decided that we needed some pictures of Claire and her grandmas. An opportunity like that doesn't happen every day. Although they aren't huge fans of being in front of the camera, they were good sports, which I'm thankful for since some of them ended up being treasures.