We put Jason in a toddlers' soccer class over the summer and he hated it. He didn't want to run or even get out of our arms, and when it was his turn to kick the ball he'd almost invariably burst into tears. I don't know what's changed between now and then, though, because when he saw some of the other kids at Sunday's birthday party chasing the ball around, he couldn't get enough.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 55-200mm VR DX lens, in aperture priority exposure mode, center-weighted average metering. Focal length 200mm, aperture f/5.6, shutter 1/125 sec, ISO 200. Post-processing in Aperture 3: Auto WB adjustment, picked from a white part of the design on his shirt; curve to reduce exposure, bring up blacks, and add contrast.

Thoughts for improvement: I like the way the grass looks with the narrow depth of field, but this would probably have been better at f/8 or maybe even f/11. I was shooting wide open mainly to keep a fast shutter speed and avoid motion blur, but here I managed to miss the focus just a bit—you can see that the front of the ball is soft, and due to his stance, his right leg is a bit further away from the camera than his left, and is therefore also slightly out of focus. Stopping down to f/8 would have given me a lot more leeway with focus depth and probably still would have had shallow enough depth of field to separate him from the background.