I could work at Sears if I had to.

In our continuing attempt to keep things as normal as possible, Meredith and I kept a play date for Tuesday. My friend Toni, who I met through Alex’s soccer team last fall, also has an interest in photography. That’s actually how we started talking, come to think of it! Toni borrowed a studio lighting set from a friend and invited us over to play around with it.

Toni has four a-d-o-r-a-b-l-e children. Meredith was so excited to play with Lauren, Toni’s oldest daughter. Lauren is 5 and that makes her neat as can be in Meredith’s book. “Being 5 is magical!” After several lack-of-a-nap induced tantrums from Meredith, we managed to take a few pictures.

We had to bribe the kids with a trip to the Dairy Queen to get them to stop playing long enough so that we could shoot them. We had to remove Barbie’s corvette and a rubber snake out of the frame more times than I can count. It was fun chaos and great to learn with a friend. I’m afraid of off camera lighting, so it was such an awesome opportunity to learn without feeling intimidated.

Here are a few results from our playdate:

Lesson learned...Meredith is very easily "blown out" with any sort of direct lighting. Despite the anemic look, I still like the outlines of her curls. I'm so afraid she'll loose her curls, that I border on obsessive about documenting them. Is that a sign that I should get a job?!