As I mentioned last month, one of my projects in December was the 95th birthday party for my great-grandmother (God bless her). In that post, I mentioned a lot of the unknowns around trying to shoot a lot of photos and doing portraits instead of my usual landscapes, etc. Well, most of that all turned out not the way I had anticipated.

lt was still well, though. It was a nice party and everyone had a good time. I’ve posted my first set of photos (one of two cameras), and you can find them on Flickr under the Gussie’s 95th photoset. I’ve also included a few of my favorites below. There were a lot of people taking photos, and these are utlimately being used for our family’s website, The Ciolinos. A few of my distant relatives, many of who I just met on Saturday, will be emailing me their favorites as well, so those will be added to the same photoset. Attribution will be credited to photos that I didn’t take, once they’re posted.

One of the unanticipated things on my part was that there was about 8 different people with cameras all trying to take photos at the same time. A few of us commented that it was kind of silly the way some of these group photos came out because different people were looking at different cameras. With 80+ people crammed into a tight golf course restaurant, there wasn’t going to be any chance of making order out of that chaos.

Still, it was good practice. Shooting portraits and group photos is not exactly my primary focus. I’m not certain that it ever will be, but experience is experience, and the more photos I shoot in many different situations, the better. I will no doubt learn from all of them.