"Breakfast" - Cereal

I am not much of a breakfast person.

Actually, that's not entirely true. I love breakfast. I love the foods of breakfast; omelets to pastries, I love it all equally.

Unfortunately, I also love sleep, and indulging in the one usually leaves little or no time for the other, so on most days my breakfast looks something like this:

Delicious. The secret is to sweeten the milk before steaming and frothing. Trust me.

But the assignment for this week was "breakfast" and not "unhealthy habits" so I decided to take a few different approaches to the subject.

Cereal is a huge part of breakfast in my house. Both of the girls choose Cheerios as their first meal a few times a week, and like most one year olds, The Boy has them all the time. They are a useful finger food to help him improve his manual dexterity, and as a bonus, they keep him entertained for minutes at a time while his Mommy tries to do crazy things like load the dishwasher.

In short, Cheerios make us happy.

This is the photo as I took it. Again, I think I framed it poorly. Not only did I put the smile in the middle of the shot, but (as my cousin pointed out) I also clipped the top of the spoon.

The first problem is fixable with a little cropping, but there's nothing I can do about the second.

I also think that the lighting and exposure are not flattering. Not only does my cute bowl look dirty, but the milk looks like it has been sitting there for a week.

I wanted the photo to look cheerful. I am not looking for subtlety since I associate Cheerios with my children and subtlety is pretty much lost on them completely.

I played around with the photo and ended up trying to focus on making the photo look "happy", if that makes sense.

I ended up just trying to brighten everything - the milk, the spoon, the flowers on the bowl - in an effort to brighten the photo and overcome my poor lighting.

I think the final photo is playful and fun, but I can't stop looking for the top of that darned spoon

Moving on, I took one other approach to the "cereal" idea when I was grocery shopping yesterday.

I originally wanted to get a shot of the entire aisle, but all the various ads and doodads that they hang from the shelves make it impossibly cluttered. Instead, I chose the Special K box since it is the simplest.

Maybe it's just me, but I like that the K is almost running toward you in the photo instead of running away like it would be I had taken it in the other direction.

All I actually did to edit the picture was straigten it out since the edge of the first box of cereal seems crooked to me, and then I increased the saturation and sharpened the lines a bit.

Meh. It's okay. I think that the idea in my head was better than the execution.

Also, I really do have to get a tripod.