Portraits (6 months)

We decided to get Elise's 6 months portraits taken, and will probably follow up with Christmas portraits and other biannual occurrences. We were hoping things would be timed just right with this first time photo-session: that she'd be well rested, well fed, happy, not afraid of the stranger with the gadgetry and flashes, etc. Well, she didn't get her morning nap, but did fall asleep just before arriving at the studio. Being a little sleepy and in her leery-of-strangers mode, she just wasn't up for responding to the photographer with smiles. Mom, dad, and Jake were all there to make silly sounds and interact playfully, but little was working. The photographer used what seemed like must have been an old trick, fanning Elise's face with little blasts of air, which seemed to kind of startle her and just barely eek out little smiles. In the end the pictures that were selected and offered to us for sale were better than we could have expected, given that she just wasn't in a silly smiling mood (like she usually is). Here are a few that we have, from screenshots, off the photo-session web page. The fourth one down looked like the best portrait to us, when we were at the studio, so we asked them to print us up a few copies to send off to the grandparents. But now, looking at the various poses, its not so clear why we chose the one we did. Funny how things change like that. Must be that the variation in cuteness between these is so small that its affected by the weather or something.