Ellen Reinis Photography: Operation Welcome Home Brunch

I had a personal growth experience on Wednesday that I thought I'd share. As I wrote in Monday's post, I took a bunch of random pictures over last weekend at my friends' wedding which I was SO excited about. This is the first wedding that I've taken pictures of with the intention of wanting to shoot a wedding "for real" some day (get paid). When I uploaded the pictures to my computer, a TON of them were out of focus. Not extremely out of focus, but enough that you wouldn't really want to look at them for long :)

I was really bummed and felt awful mainly because I am really hard on myself and strive too much for perfection which leads me to be extremely disappointed when, well.......I'm not perfect (which is most of the time). So I wallowed in my sorrows that night, even after Lee reassured me that this was all part of the learning process, and then went to bed. On Thursday morning, remembering what he said and determined not to wallow, but learn and move on, I logged into the Digital Wedding Forum and created a new thread asking other photographers why my pics were so out of focus. I also emailed Lindsey from Sweet Monday, hoping she would have pity on me ;) After a few rounds on my thread and a few emails with Lindsey, I realized what mistake I had made - manually focusing my lens. At an event like a wedding, I should NOT manually focus - nope, never, nada. Makes it WAY too hard since it's an event and an uncontrolled environment.

Although I felt a bit like "DUH!!", I realized that I really DID learn something. Although I may only have about 15 pictures to show for Freddy & Laura's wedding, the other 200 are a great tool to learn from! So that was my instance of personal growth; embracing my mistakes instead of expecting perfection. HUGE!

So, on to some pictures. Here are a few more from the ND Brunch.

Toni Reinis, Executive Director/co-Founder