Back to Work

It's been a great week, and I really mean that! Compare this year to last year, and at this point I could have told you the year was going to be a disaster - I would have been told that my weekly lesson plans would be 10 pages long, I would have to account for a lot of stuff that didn't matter, and that there was no scope & sequence to follow. This year: no mandated lesson plan forms, a scope and sequence that works (because we wrote it 2 years ago), a general feeling of trust and happiness all around. Ahhhh. I am so excited!

All of that, I'm a little nervous about getting our classroom together. Two of the custodial staff came by and saw our disaster, and then they brought two friends to come and see it. It really was that trashed. They came again at the end of the day and were impressed with the progress we had made. They took away our workday (to work in our rooms) for "training" next week, so I left training today to work on our room. It's all in place; it's not pretty, but it's functional.

We took an inaugural swim at the church pool, and I got to snap some pictures of handsome little Tripp. I was excited to get to practice on the smooth baby skin and blue eyes (we don't have any of those around here!). Plus, I wanted to work more with my 50 prime lens to see if I could get the sharpness I see in some other photographer's work. Plus, if I can get my focus skills correct, then I can borrow that Billy Bob lens to see if it shoots as crisp as all the reviews say it does (because when I used it, it didn't, but I'm pretty sure it was operator error). Despite what people think, a great camera does not a great photograph make :) !

So, I shall practice...I was focusing on his eyes, so it worked well. I tried one to focus on his bubbles, but I focused on his nostrils instead...I deleted that one.

Here he is, just smiling and being the happy little man that he is...my focus appears to be his left eye. That was the plan, anyway. You can see it better if you double click to make it bigger.

Who can resist a little foot, especially when it's all wrinkly from being in the pool! There appears to be no focus point, and it's not as crisp as I would like, so lesson: larger aperture. I think it was probably moving, knowing baby feet, so a faster shutter might have helped, too.