We went to another birthday party for one of Jason's friends this weekend. Parks make good venues for kids' parties, in part because they're less crowded than a house when you have a lot of guests, but also because there's a built-in activity for the kids. As you can see, Jason enjoyed himself.

Technical information: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX lens in aperture-priority exposure mode. Aperture f/8, shutter 1/640 sec, ISO 200. White balance correction and curves applied in Aperture 3.

Thoughts for improvement: This shot was taken right near mid-day, so the light was very harsh. If this had been a professional portrait shoot, I'd have preferred it to be earlier in the day or to have had an assistant holding up a screen to help diffuse the light. Some fill light, either on-axis or from camera left, would probably also have helped. This particular frame worked out well enough with the exposure, but since I was in aperture priority mode, a lot of the others from the party were blurry due to slow shutter speed—in the future I'm going to have to either set my auto ISO configuration better or learn how to expose manually.