Ice Cream!

On account of good behavior, Olivia and Leo got to share an ice cream (okay, frozen yogurt that seems to have far too few calories to possibly be tasty) after dinner. Olivia took delight in being the arbiter of the ice cream, controlling exactly how much her little brother received – but to her credit, she was reasonably fair with the occasional reminder that the treat wasn’t hers alone.

(Courtesy break here to save your RSS reader from too many photos)

I’m still so happy with the results that Nikon’s 24-70 f/2.8 lens produces that I rarely use anything else when shooting the kids inside the house – it’s what I used for all of the above. However, this does mean I tend to accumulate quite a few shots with a similar overall look, especially since the zoom range of that lens isn’t all that big. So as they were whittling down their dessert, I switched to the 10-24 – the exact opposite of a portrait lens, and not something that seems designed for indoor use – and took a few more playful shots:

I wouldn’t take these instead of the “standard” shots, and since all of these were at 11mm with the camera in some funny spots, I couldn’t actually see or focus properly, but it does seem like it’s worth switching things up once in a while to get a different look.

I’m glad I was shooting RAW in all of these cases, because for some reason, the auto white balance was off by more than usual, and with default settings everything was lot more yellow than it should have been. I’ve noticed this when taking pictures at our home here in Kirkland; it seems like perhaps our ceiling (which the flash is bouncing off) isn’t entirely white. Fortunately, it’s easy to fix this without any loss of fidelity when shooting RAW – which is why I think pros can debate RAW vs. JPEG, but non-photographers like me should really shoot RAW to fix errors later!

Of course, even if tonight’s shots had been a total loss, there’s still 15 more bars of ice cream in the box – so unless Mommy and I experience a disturbingly strong craving for ice cream, there will be plenty more opportunities.