Maybe Laura Hausfeld didn’t fully know what she was getting herself into when she signed up to photograph Kindy Kids 2018.

The feature is a 12-page spread of photos in Thursday’s edition of The Northern Daily Leader.

Like herding cats, getting whole classes of brand-new students to co-operate led to some funny and frustrating moments.

Your exclusive sneak preview to the Kindy kids feature, here

But Miss Hausfeld said she “really, really enjoyed the experience and it was a lot of fun”.

Her task was to capture the gorgeous faces of this year’s batch of Kindergarten children from the dozens of schools in our area.

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In the days of film, the rule of thumb was to shoot a roll of 24 exposures for that one good shot – and our intrepid amateur snapper certainly found this to be the case.

“There were some tears, some wanted their mums, others had a huge grin on their face,” she said.

“We had to take them off-guard to get that nice picture.

“My trick was to make them laugh – distract them by making funny faces, being a bit silly.”

Many kids were super-excited to see the Leader car turn up. In fact, sometimes the challenge was getting a natural smile instead of a cheesy grin.

“I think they were all a bit excited to be famous in the paper,” Miss Hausfeld said.

As for the adage of never working with children or animals, when Miss Hausfeld was jokingly warned that next year’s kids would bring in their pets, she said: “I love children and animals … That would be perfect.”