A mini photo session

This year some farmers around our house are planting wheat.  I've always loved family pictures with wheat as a background and now we have it in our back yard.  Anyway, we don't have a fancy camera, actually very far from it but it takes ok pictures for us.  I did think one of these summers I'll get a friend photographer to take some pictures of us because it makes a difference but I didn't do it this year and she's pretty booked.  Plus, once you set a date and the weather doesn't work out it's hard to reschedule.  But the most important thing is when the wheat is just right for pictures and it is so hard to know ahead of time.  It's been getting golden in color lately so I thought we needed to take the pictures soon if we wanted that but then Ehren came home yesterday and he says to me that across the road from us they already started harvesting the fields.  In my mind I'm like we better do it right now before they start to harvest the field behind our house.  And it was a nice sunny day so it was perfect.  Usually if we schedule any kind of a family photo shoot I stress over the outfits so everyone matches and I never have anything flattering to wear that matches the rest of the family and so on. :)  But it took me only about 15 minutes to pick out clothes for everyone which must be a record for me.  I knew the easiest is to go with white for the kids although I don't have much for white tops or dresses but then the shirt I like on Ehren is similar in colors to my dress and it worked great with the kids.

my favorite of all of us

So we got out there before the sun started setting, set up a tripod with our little Lumix digital camera and took a few shots.  The hardest thing every time is to get all the kids smiling nice, not fake smiling or looking down or covering their faces or whatever they do.  But it seems to me that it doesn't matter if we look into a tripod or if a photographer is taking pictures of them, it is hard to get them all looking nice.  And then there are those couple shots when the kids look all cute and I have no idea what is the face I'm making. :)  So it's not easy to get all of us looking great, but I didn't even care last night.  I just wanted to see how the pictures would turn out with the wheat field and using our camera.  I took a few more pictures of just the kids when we were done and those are cute too even though you can guess that we had to make Kade hold Anika's hand. :)

If you saw the pictures as they came directly from our camera, they didn't look great at all.  The colors weren't vibrant, just very plain.  But with the help of my good buddy Picasa the pictures turned out beautifully, at least for the camera we were using.  I'm still not done playing around with them and there is so much I could change on each picture, but here are a few I quickly enhanced.  I'm glad I got Ehren in on the pictures too because we have so few pictures of all of us as a family.

Not sure what I'm doing here, I am saying something to the kids so they pay attention to the light on the camera

our 2 little buddies