Tears!

Luckily this photo was taken outside so I did not have to deal with lighting so much, cause dealing with the kids was enough.  I feel bad cause this one focused on Dillon crying, but in truth, Jordyn, Porter, and Dillon all shed a fair share of tears during this little shoot.  Then top it off with Brooks showing off his rock and roll side and a few more grandkids to bored to look at the camera.  All in all, you have the makings of the average christmas family photo!

Christmas Pictures

These are the first pictures I have taken indoors for a long long time.  It sucked.  I had read a tutorial about how to take good photos of a christmas tree.  The trick is to leave the shutter open for a long time.  That is impossible with a 1 year old.  These 4 pictures are about the only ones without a blur.  Eventually, I just gave up and turned on the flash which completely washed out the tree.  With all of these, thankfully, a spotlight focused on the tree brightened up those lights and made the pictures with the flash turn out ok.  But oh boy, these were some frustrating pictures to take.

Another thing I had going against me here was the window.  In almost all of them, you can see a horrible reflection of the flash.  So, I did my best to copy a section of the window that was not destroyed by the flash and lay it on top of the flash invested mess.  Lucky for me, it turned out ok! 

Christmas Card

So, I have never altered a photo as much as I did this one.  I had my mom snap this when she was visiting us during thanksgiving.  I so wish I could take the picture and be in the picture at the same time to get it just how I want it.  It is just in our backyard against our fence.  To make it work with the card I had printed I reversed it.  Jordyn's face is pasted from another picture.  My face is pasted from another picture.  I added some light coming in from the right.  It played with it for days before I felt ok about it.  And still, I only feel ok about it.

Pumpkin Patch

What I love about these pictures:-bright contrasting colors; magenta, orange, sky blues, specks of green...
-angles; especially the landscape one
-lighting; what a bright beautiful day
-fall; I just love fall

What I don't so much love:
-the camera.  I took these with my small power shot and I remember why I love my DSL so much.

Birthday Girl

My baby girl turned 1 last week.  I have been trying to learn how to make a collage and realized there is so much I can learn!  Here is my first one:

This took me about 2 hours.  I started by editing all 12 pictures with the text.  I then realized that I could just add the text after placing the picture.  That was so much easier.  So these next few I made were a lot quicker.  I also figured out there are cool backgrounds, frames, colors, text and a whole lot more that I have not explored yet.

Here are all the pictures I took and edited of Jordyn on her birthday.  Well, I took a bazillion, but these are the best and the ones I chose to edit.  Originally, I was going to get some ballons for the picture, but I got lazy an just went with the birthday hat.

All Fun and Games

Another one...

So, after I edited and posted the last shot with the wrought iron, i went back and found this one that had some of the wrought iron in it too.

So my goal with this one was to bring out the iron.  There was really no direction to the natural light here.  So I made it black and white with about 80% opacity.  Then put in a strong spotlight coming in from the left.  I originally had the spotlight coming in from the right, thinking it would spotlight the iron.  But it really just washed out the iron.  When I took it to the left it brought it out a little more.  Still, not as dramatic as the first wrought iron picture I did in the last post.  But this is the best edit I have done with this picture.  Before I was trying to make the baby the focus, but when I gave up on that, it all turned out better.