my muse, my challenge

You know, despite having some severe apprehensions, there are times when I do look forward to having another baby eventually.  For example, I was just thinking how nice it will be to have an immobile photographic model once again.  We bought our digital SLR camera just a few months before D was born, and he was my main subject for a long time.  He fascilitated my love affair with my 50mm lens, because he was a great subject for it.  I could shoot "wide open" and, because he didn't move much (at least for a while), it was relatively easy for me to get gorgeous results with fairly accurate focusing at even very shallow depths of focus.  Over these past two years I have found that I definitely gravitate much more towards this style of photography, with its delicious blurriness and infinite loveliness, and D has played a big part in me figuring that out.  (Also, Zach gets quite a bit of credit for buying our little "nifty fifty" to begin with, which is the lens with which I take the vast majority of my pictures and tend to feel the most creative).

And we had a blissful six months of immobile picture-taking joy.  Then he started scooting, and that was a slight challenge, but not too bad.  Crawling came next, and then walking, and suddenly pictures started getting quite a bit tougher to capture.  It's helped me improve on my ability to switch focus points faster, but mostly it's just tough to take good pictures of him.

And now?  Well.  Now he's figured out that there's a little screen on the back of the camera that shows him pictures.  And he is OBSESSED with looking through pictures (and videos) of himself and other family members.  He could literally sit at the computer for a good hour or longer just cycling through photo slide shows or home videos.  It's kinda scary.  Then as of this week anytime I pull out either my small point-and-shoot camera or the SLR he stops whatever he's doing, runs to the camera, and starts saying "Watch! Watch!" over and over, because he wants to see pictures on the playback screen.

*Sigh* Oh well.  As long as I'm able to get a good one of him every once in a while I suppose I'll be ok...