Wow, I’ve not had that much fun in months. I really wasn’t looking forward to it at all. I was in fact dreading it and had been for several days. I’ve been in the doldrums as of late, so I wasn’t in the mood to be social, but damn I had a good time. I’m not sure I’ve ever had so much fun at the expense of drunk people, and boy are they funny. At the beginning I was pretty stiff, still not really wanting to be there, but after a little while I started to loosen up, for whatever reason. It probably had to do with the fact that everybody was drunk and wasn’t going to remember this, ever. I also started not caring whether people cared if I was taking pictures of them, so I started to take a whole bunch of pictures. I ran down my battery, let it charge some, ran it down again, let it charge some, and then ran it down again. I’m beginning to think I need a pistol grip battery along with some new glass. Looking at the pictures now, it seems like my primary issues were focus, lighting, and framing. I became more and more aware of being too close to the people in the picture, so I would back away and let the flash travel a bit (if I had the space to take a step back). The place was pretty dark, so I was using a flash, and wasn’t really in the mood to try any manual aperture mode. I figured that the reason why the camera was intent on pre-flashing alot was due to the low light and not being able to autofocus, which I also imagine didn’t help the battery situation much. Since I was blinding a bunch of people and didn’t have much battery to spare, I didn’t really feel like making them sit through several takes. And finally since it was also dark, I had some trouble seeing what I was photographing through the viewfinder. So, to recap, I need to pay more attention to framing (I was just being lazy mostly when this happened), bring a better battery, take at least 2+ of everything (to aid in better odds of a good autofocus), while simultaneously getting better at paying attention to the focus before taking the picture and being more diligent about checking the proof. I guess that part of it was that sometimes it just didn’t want to take, so I would hold down the button so that it eventually would take (which could have been a bunch of them). By then I didn’t have too much control over what exactly was in focus and didn’t want people to have to pose any longer.

In other news, I am in serious want of a wife…