Getting a Portrait for the County Fair

The fair is coming soon, and there is lots of prep going on. Kellen is taking market rabbits. He has been working hard trying to tame the rabbits so he can handle them for the judging. For the market judging he, and half a dozen other kids or so, will have three rabbits on the table at a time. I envision rabbits hopping everywhere, but we'll see.

Wednesday we started working on the letter he will give to potential buyers before the fair. (If you're looking for some good rabbits from a great kid, the Cabell County Fair Livestock auction starts at 6:00 Friday the 25th.) We decided to include a picture with the letter. The picture will also be displayed with the rabbits at the fair. We are hoping that will help put the name with the face and increase the bidders on his pen of three come auction time.

To get the portrait we had an amateur photo shoot. Kellen put on his 4-H shirt. These are shirts the club had made, like company logo shirts, only for our 4-H club. We had hoped to do the photo outside, but as soon as we had the rabbits out the sky open up and dump on us. We had everything else ready, so we took the rabbits inside for the photo.

Getting decent pictures in our house is tough. We turned on every light. It still was not enough light. We moved all the lamps closer and took off the shades. That was much better, still not great, but as good as it was going to get. I hung a throw on the cabinet behind Kellen and the rabbits. Then we took pictures, lots of pictures. We tried different angles, different poses, and different facial expressions to try to get a good one.

Kellen picked the photo he like the best. I used the editing tools in our Kodak software to crop and enhance it slightly. Above is the final product. I still wish the lightening had been better, but I think it is a decent portrait for someone who is pretty clueless about photography. Don't burst my bubble ok? Now we will add it to the letter and print out a larger copy for the display.

I'm thinking about entering a few things to the fair too. I've never entered anything except market lambs when I was a kid. I'm not exactly sure what I would enter, maybe green beans or something else from the garden. Have you ever entered a pie or produce? Got any tips or pointers?