Frolicking in the Daisies

We had a perfect spring day yesterday and the daisies agreed. They're not at their thickest yet, next week our farm will be carpeted in white, but enough to start trying to capture this year's 'children in the daisies' pictures. Every year I have a bash at getting the elusive perfect shot and am frequently foiled by the bright contrasty sunlight (which is what makes the daisies unfurl their petals) and the glare from all these white flowers. The kids are usually squinting in the brightness, with dark shadows thrown by their hats on their faces. I'm aiming for an album with a page for each year, full of our children frolicking in the flowers, growing up in the daisies.

This year we had an ulterior motive too. We're setting up a photo library on our A Flower Gallery site, where you can download photos for a small fee, hence the letters on this pic. I've been learning, more than I ever thought I would, about Photoshop - resizing, retouching, adding letters to the sample photos so that they can't be used so easily without permission, and staring at my computer screen, instead of the enticing view through the window, to the daisies and mountains.

The kids were cooperative models for a short time, but as it got closer to lunch time patience wore thin, and the appropriate captions for the resulting pictures were more likely to be 'Stomping off in a grump through the daisies'.

We had decided on a policy of using only the generic pictures of them for the library, not portraits where they are easily recognizable. So trying to get pictures of them walking away through the flowers hand-in-hand was the aim...and we did get some...but how eloquent backs can be! Some of the shots clearly say, 'my Mum made me do this and I actually want to go and pick up pine cones over there and now I think about it I'm hungry'. Still there's always next week.