Second Chances

The school presented the musical, OZ, over the weekend. You know, just in case you missed that from all the pictures I've put up here. Luke was a part of it, and worked so hard at practices after school for weeks on end. He was a scarecrow in a dance, and a flying monkey the remainder of the play. They presented the play both Friday evening and Saturday evening, and I attended both of course. When your kid puts that much work into something, you support them 358%.

I took my camera and my zoom lens with me to get photographic evidence of the event for our end-of-year photo album. I chose to sit in the back of the auditorium because the auditorium is small and even clear in the back I can see just fine. And also because I am short, and when anyone sits in front of me I cannot see. I figured the chances of someone sitting directly in front of me when I was in the clear back row were slim to none, and in the event that someone did, I could then stand in the aisle and wouldn't block the view of anyone behind me. It was a win all around, right up until someone sat in front of me. A very large someone who almost completely blocked my view. Thankfully I was on the end of the row and was able to look around them. But I got revenge. The constant and rather loud "beep, snap" of my camera seemed to be a personal annoyance to the someone in front of me. Except I was there first, so I didn't really care.

I put the zoom lens on the camera and watched the play through it. I got to see every facial expression. It was sweet. And then when Luke came out as a flying monkey, I realized there was a problem. He was in heavy make-up, like this:

And because I chose to sit so very far away from the stage, and Luke's make-up was dark like the surroundings, and his face was small on the large stage, the camera wasn't sure exactly what to focus on. It would choose his light-colored hands instead even though I told it repeatedly that I wanted it to focus higher. On a face. But that was just the start of the fiasco that was Friday night's photo endeavor.

The fact that I spent over an hour looking at the play through a magnifying glass (hello, zoom lens that I love),  and failed to wear my glasses, my eyes were not very happy when I stopped looking through the lens to look at the photo I had just taken. What I saw was blurry. Very blurry. I was peeved, because I knew I was having focusing problems, and clearly it was far worse than I thought it was. So I did what any photographer would do. I adjusted my settings. Except when I adjusted my settings to take care of the blur that the camera was making, I didn't realize that it was my eyes making the blur.

You guys, because my eyes were bad (and I forgot my glasses), I ended up adjusting the camera to make the photos blurry, thinking I'd corrected the problem. Turns out, I made it worse. Far worse.

I'm just really, really glad that I had a second night to correct my mistake. And yes, I wore my glasses the second night. And trusted my camera settings to be what they said they were instead of second guessing them.