The photo shoot went great on Wednesday.  When I arrived I was told that it looked like there were only going to be around 30 children.  I kept a little ledger of their names as we went and when I got to 30 on my list I thought I must me be nearly done.  The nursery nurses did a quick head count and there were still THIRTY ONE to do!!

I spent 7 hours on my knees and rolling around on the floor making silly faces. I photographed 61 children from 10 weeks old to 5 years old, I stopped 3 times for 5 minutes each… and I loved every minute of it.  But I have to say, I’m too young to feel as old as I did the day after!

I only ran into 2 hitches for the shoot, both my fault… I should have taken my second memory card as I ran out of space (it is a very large card!) and I had to begin editing there and deleting shots and for some very bizarre reason one of the cables for my studio lights was missing from my bag so I was down one light.  I have shot with only one light before, so it wasn’t that big of a deal, but I did get a few unwanted shadows on my back drop.

I will spend today editing the shots and narrowing it down to one or 2 shots per child and hopefully getting them off to the printers for the proofs.  It looks like I got some really good portraits, except for the few children who were just too wigged out by the whole thing to even smile… and I had one mom in with three boys aged 5, 3 and a very new baby and I know I don’t have good shot of them.  The baby screamed and the five year old refused to let anyone (including brothers) touch him!!

In other news:

Daniel took on a ‘mountain’ of hardcore with a ride in toy car last night and… lost.  I heard him and the neighbour boy screaming (and thought they were having a rip-roaring fight) but then then I heard Rosie freaking out too… The amount of blood was dizzying and the wound on his head was about a quarter of an inch long… but when we (my neighbour Beth sorta took over, bless her!!) got it cleaned up we (and my other neighbour Amanda, who is a mid-wife and more use to stitching the other end of the other sex, but knew what she was talking about none-the-less) realised it wasn’t as deep as the blood would have led us to believe, so no stitches were required.

Daniel was extremely brave… Rosie was not.  At one point, Daniel had a cool compress up against the wound, and he was reaching out stroking Rosie and telling her it would be OK, but she sobbed on.  Two hours later when I was putting her in her bath, she shuddered, squeezed her eyes tight and with a voice full of emotion gasped “Oh! Moma… it keeps popping up into my head!!” The at dinner she cried again because she didn’t want to sit next to Daniel in case he turned his head and she saw it again because “it will give me bad dreams!!” I am keeping them both home from school today…

And *sigh* the chicken… expired.