Chasing a Five Year Old

This is Shannon, my friends Miriam and Dan's granddaughter. She is so adorable, she makes your heart melt.

She's wise far beyond her years. Talking with her is like talking with an adult - her speech is impeccable, and her language skills are amazing. She's quite serious in her discussions. She's definitely not your typical five year old.

Except in one category - she has non-stop energy. This kid never slows down. I chased her around the black berry patch the other day with my camera, hoping to get some good photos. She ran me around that patch four times!

She's so fast, I had a difficult time keeping up with her. She's not particularly good on focusing on a single task, normal for a five year old, so it was a challenge to keep up with her as she picked a berry here, then moved 10 feet to pick "better" berries, then backed up three feet because she had missed two "really big berries!"

So much for camera focus. I changed to Plan B - hope that she's distracted enough by berry picking that she'd stay in one spot for more than 2 seconds. She was very aware of the camera, and kept attempting to pose, which didn't work at all.

Of course, all this continual motion kept me hopping around. I was trying to focus and adjust for lighting, as she just did her normal five year old stuff. It wasn't too long before I realized I was probably only going to get a few good shots - if I was lucky.

And that's exactly how it turned out - I have lots of blurs (she moves SO fast!), and plenty of other unusable shots. Out of more than 50 shots, there might be five that are acceptable.

But we sure had fun picking berries . . .