Playing in the Leaves

I love those moments as a parent where something is unplanned, it just happens and both the parent and the children enjoy it. I try to listen to my children where fun is allowed. As I have gotten older I find that I have less and less just plain-old fun. Not to say that my life isn't full, but after I turned 40 I find that I just start falling apart. Simple things that I used to do, I don't do with the reckless abandon of childhood. I have and probably will again hurt myself. I get cautious. On these things I need my children to remind me of what "fun" really is and more importantly how simple it is to have it.

The leaves have started to fall here in Illinois. Our yard has some 6 50-60 yr old Oaks in it. Needless to say I know leaves, they aren't however friends of mine. About 4-5 times a year I have to rake up a pile that ends up being about 8 ft square and about 4 foot high. I mostly think at the end of this, boy had I been younger I would love to have played in that pile of leaves. Well that day has come. My children had occasion to help me move this pile around the yard. As you can imagine as this pile grows it gets more and more difficult to move it with a rake. Punkin had her rake and she was getting all of the leaves from behind the plants and putting them out into the grassy yard. Buddy wanted to help, with Buddy though, you never quite know what type of help to expect. He can sometimes be more of a distraction than real help. In this case though he had a spark of genius in him.

Since all the rakes were used up he walked into the shed and grabbed the first thing that came to his mind. He brought out the large broom and was going to sweep up the leaves. One can only imagine an 8-yr old boy with a broom trying to move leaves. His first attempt moved them more into the freshly raked yard, making a larger mess. After a chastise from Dad, he got going into the correct direction. For some reason this didn't work much for him. The broom was discarded after only a few moments of use. He then disappeared into the shed and out he comes with a snow shovel! The old man did not give this much more hope than the last genius plan he had concocted. I sold him short though.

He started pushing the leaves into the middle of the yard moving the large pile with some ease. I praised him for his ingenuity and was grateful that his help, was actually helpful. Punkin not wanting to miss an opportunity wanted to trade her rake with Buddy for the shovel. Buddy had nothing to to with this. Buddies attention span is more like that of a 3 year old which is about 3 minutes so after the allotted time he moved on and Punkin scraped up the shovel and went about shoveling the leaves. I will admit to some pride as all of us moved the leaves down towards the house in the back yard.

With all of the hard work done, Punkin an Buddy wanted to play in the leaves. They dove in, buried themselves, threw leaves here an there and generally just loved running and jumping into the pile. Then Punkin wanted me to join in. As some might recall early this summer we all had a running start and jumped into the water at a Wisconsin lake house we had the pleasure to stay at. Well Punkin wanted to re-create this fun, in this case though the old man was worried about falling on the ground and the leaves not breaking his fall. Well guess what, they do. You don't see pictures of this, but for a 40 year old leaves are just as much fun, if not "funner" when shared with your children. Remind me to stop being such a curmudgeon the next time please.

On to some other details. After my last set of images I had a number of comments about culling and them being OOF (out of focus) I will admit that I struggle to cull my images many times, mostly because of who I share them with. I have many times had an image that I almost through away but, when it is seen through someone elses eyes, it takes on a new light for them than it did for me. That is why I like feedback. In this case and in the Tiny Trains post. I struggle because most of the images are OOF and since in most cases it tells somewhat of a story for relatives, I keep more photos than I would normally because it shows what we did and how it looked. Now what I have on my wall is completely different. What's on the wall is not what is always online.

The bain of my pictures seems to be focus, I continually forget how fast children move and my own steadying abilities. All of these shots were taken with a flash, but the other thing I am always guilty of is trying to get a very shallow depth of field. I love good bokeh. These pictures suffer from what is in my head and what I can actually produce. Later in the series I got smart. I shot these with an 85mm lens at f2.2 on my S5. Silly. You are not going to get in-focus shots of a moving target even with AF with that tiny of DOF (depth of field) Stop down a few more stops and the background will still be blurred and you will have in-focus children. You think I would learn.

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