"Amateur" Photographer...

    More like "immature" photographer (hardy har), but does anyone else like to dress your kids up and pretend you're an amateur photographer? As you may have gathered, one of the main reasons I like to make home, hygiene, and baby items myself is to cut costs where possible. My penny pinching habits don't stop there, though.
    I have loved taking pictures for as long as I can remember and now that I have my daughter I especially love taking pictures of her, of course. However, I'm starting to wonder if I have gone too far with it, even though I don't really care if I have. :D While I respect professional photographers, I have thought for a long time that most of their prices are absurd! With that being said and being the tight wad that I am, I've not had any professional (or amateur) photos taken for any of the special events in my adult life that most people do. My husband and I didn't have any engagement pictures taken. The few family members we had at our wedding took our "wedding pictures". I never had any newborn or family photos taken when my daughter was born. My family and I took them. I have continued this pattern with her Christmas photos and soon Easter photos.
    Sure, professional ones look a lot more, well, professional, but I think doing it yourself is just as nice for several reasons. 1) You can take them whenever you want so you can catch your child in a good mood! 2) You're the one trying to make them smile or laugh, so they're probably more likely to do it for you than some stranger making stupid faces. ;) 3) It saves SO MUCH MONEY! You can make as many copies as you want and it should still be cheaper than having someone else do them. 4) You can use whatever props you want. 5) You can always edit them yourself with free photo editing programs like Gimp. 6) Personally, I like doing it myself because they seem more natural; baby is more relaxed and acting like normal and is in her usual environment. Maybe I'm just a fan of candids. :)
    I didn't intend on turning this post into some sort of diy crusade, although it appears that happened anyways. :D I'm certainly not trying to make anyone feel bad or mad about getting professional pictures taken either. But, if you're a cheapo like me, just give it a try one day. I actually had a lot of fun when I did Myka's Christmas pictures. (I think I was having more fun than she was at one point.) I'm still curious, though, do any of you do anything like this? I'd love to hear your thoughts or ideas!

    These are just a few. As you can see, I could have spiffed them up more and taken more time to make them look better, but I'm impatient and she was only 2 months old at the time so she was too! lol The bottom one I actually had my graphic designer friend fix for me. She does fantastic work on all sorts of things. Here is the link to her page if you're interested: http://www.designstar.co.uk/index.htm