My wife bought a red dress for my granddaughter, Eva, to wear at Christmas. Here it is hanging on the closet door.

I resolved to get a photo of Eva wearing the dress, but with a three-year-old, that requires some planning and patience. We decided to try for a day a few days before Christmas, but on that day, we couldn’t get Eva into the dress until after the sun had set, so that complicated the lighting. I had to use a flash outdoors to make her the brightest part of the photo. And getting a good posed shot of a three-year-old is a matter of chance. You can’t really give her direction and her attention span is short. So I follow the same advice I read when I was doing animal photography: Take what the animal (in this case, child) gives you.

This was the best shot of only a half-dozen I took before she got impatient and moved on.

Here’s one other:

I imagine it’s gets easier every Christmas—at least until they become teenagers.