Working Hard on Focus

As you all know, I've been trying to learn as much about photography as I can, so I can improve my pictures. Well I've been having a huge problem with focus with my camera. It's been driving me crazy all the out of focus pictures I end up taking. So this morning I decided to give manual focus a try. I had fun playing around with it, but I don't think it's the solution to my focus problems. Lily moves far to fast for me to continually be refocusing myself. Our cat Ouija was a much better model for practicing manual focus! She stayed nice and still!

Still not perfect, but getting there:
Much better focus. I had my aperture opened as wide as it goes, so there is a very small depth of field, one eye is in focus, other is slightly out of focus. (please correct me if my understanding is wrong! Trying to learn here!) :

I did get a couple of Lily in focus. Probably just luck though. Ouija had climbed into an empty box of diapers, and Lily was determined to join her:



I'm working on it. I know I still have a very long way to go...but I'm having a lot of fun learning!

I've have a one more picture for you from last week. Last Friday we had some crazy wind all over the state. Our power ended up going out for a few hours. So of course we broke out the flash lights and candles. Lily was really excited for some reason. She was blindly running around the apartment laughing and was fascinated by the flash light! We all had a good time just hanging out as a family reading stories by flash light, and cuddling in bed.