MomShots

We went fishing the other day at a near by lake. Maybe it’s more like a pond. It is pretty small but in its defense it does have the word “Lake” in its name. I spent all my time chasing my kids around with my camera.

As usual.

I came away with a few photos and thoughts that I wanted to share with you. The two following photos are straight out of the camera.

To set up the scene, my son, is sitting in the crotch of a tree. His face is in the shade. The sun is quite bright but shining behind him. I was standing a few feet away and snapped a picture using the light meter in my camera. The camera gathered lighting information from the bright snowy mountains behind and the from the dark tree trunk and shade covered boy in the foreground. It had to balance things out. I was shooting in manual mode and had my aperture closed all the way down to f/25. The light meter told me at what shutter speed to shoot. I blindly followed its instructions and put my shutter speed at 1/500 of a second.

The results are pretty well balanced tree trunk but my son is quite dark. I don’t like those results.

So to correct it, I scooted up close to his face and took a reading there. My light meter was not taking into account the bright mountains in the background or the dark tree trunk, just his face. I left my aperture was alone at f/25 and the light meter told me to slow down my shutter speed to 1/200 of a second. That little bit of slowing of the shutter was just enough to lighten up his face.

However, you might notice that the mountains in the background are kind of blown out or in other words, very white and bright. That is the trade off. As the photographer you have to choose what is more important. Is it more important for your background to look perfect or is it more important for your subject to be visible.

I chose the subject.

There are a couple of other ways that I could have lightened this up.

My personal preference and goal is to know how to fix problems like this while I am shooting. I don’t want to be a photographer who relies on PhotoShop to fix the problems I couldn’t figure out how to take care of in my camera.

That being said, I do think it is handy to know how to fix problems in PhotoShop. So on my next post, I will show you how I took the darker of the two photos and lightened just my son’s face in PhotoShop.

Until then… Keep those cameras clicking!

I was thinking it would be fun to have a catch phrase at the end of every post. Any ideas what it should be?

You wake up at 2am and since you can’t fall asleep again until 7am you lay in bed composing photographs in your head.

So I may be a zombie today but at least I have some good ideas for my upcoming photo shoots.

Have I told you that I have some coming up? I don’t think I mentioned it. I’m scheduled to do an engagement session and two senior portraits this next month. I’m kind of super excited about April. It’s going to be a busy and fun month!

Maybe at some point I’ll have a baby too. Who knows?

Maybe I’ll get back on track with my 52 Week Project too. I did take some shots yesterday that I think will be useful for this week’s collage. We took our boys fishing. They loved every minute of it.

Instead of the obligatory MomShot, I will leave you with a quote that I read at Photo Camp. Which was unbelievably awesome, by the way!!! I promise I’ll tell you more about it later.

Making photographs…
is a way of shouting, or freeing oneself,
not of proving or asserting one’s own originality.
It is a way of life.

~Henry Cartier-Bresson

I have been following Kate from Chronicles of a Country Girl for a couple years, I think. She’s a very talented photographer and a really cool lady as well.

She recently posted a great tutorial for adding a texture to a photograph using PhotoShop. If you are interested in checking out her method, click here.

There is also another blog that I have recently started following. Jerry Jones, from Shadowhouse Creations is a wonderful resource for free and awesome textures. He makes and posts quite a few each week. They are free to use but if you do use one, be sure to use your manners and thank him.

Jerry recently posted a tutorial for applying and blending textures.

This photo is a true “MomShot” because it is of me, the mom. It is from this past summer right before I got pregnant. I had finally reached a point in my weightloss where I felt comfortable tucking in my shirt. I’m excited to have this baby and start working on that again!

Anyway, insecurities aside, I followed Jerry’s tutorial for applying and blending textures. I did not always use the exact textures he used but chose ones that closely resembled his choices. It’s a fun thing to try and I’m very excited to experiment and develop a better trained eye at this.

Tomorrow is Photo Camp Utah 2010 and I could not be more excited. It’s going to be so much fun. I know I am going to leave so inspired and excited. I am going to learn some really great things and hopefully make some new friends.

The tickets sold out fast and so there were a lot of people that didn’t get a chance to get one. They only had 300 spaces and those were gone in one day. Who knew that year #2 would be such a hit?!? Pretty exciting, if you ask me!

So if you were one of the people who were not able to get a ticket, put away your sadness! You will be able to watch live streams of some of the classes on the internet. Ustream.com will be broadcasting the event, thanks to photographer Shane Dansie (follow him on Twitter @NikonRookie).

You can either click on this Ustream.com link or go to Ustream.com and search for #PCU2010. Both ways should work.

Obligatory MomShot:

We went to the park yesterday. I took my camera but didn’t end up with very many “good” shots. I do like this one though. I am thinking I may have over processed this one but I’m not sure. I have a hard time telling. Oh well. I’ll figure it out one of these days and when I do, I’ll write up a post about it.

One of the many blogs I follow is Jessica Sprague. She’s a digital scrapbook extraordinaire and entrepreneur who has many resources on her site. I haven’t really taken advantage of all her site has to offer but I have enjoyed glimpsing the really creative scrapbook pages I have seen on her site. I especially love the mixed medium projects that she highlights on Thursdays. For some reason I am a sucker for mixed mediums.

On Wednesdays she offers one of the products in her store for $1. Today I really thought it was cute and wanted to share it with you. It is a vintage camera kit by designer Danielle Thompson. Adorable, huh?

So for a $1 I decided to purchase that kit. This is actually the very first kit I have ever purchased. All the other kits I have were ones that I found for free. I couldn’t pass up this vintage camera cuteness and wanted to pass on the info in case anyone else has a penchant for this same thing.

I have a question for you and I actually need your response. Can you help me with this? It will just take a second.

Salt Lake City based photographer, Sara Boulter and I have been discussing putting together a workshop for moms (and other photography non-professional types) to teach how to take better pictures. Better pictures of your children, friends, the entire world…

Sara taught one of these seminars a couple years back and I went to it. It was great! I learned a lot and had a really fun and yummy time. She is hilarious and also had great prizes for everyone who came, including a new camera.

I should also mention that the cost was really affordable. It will be so this time as well.

So here’s the question:
If you live in the Mid to Northern Utah areas would you be interested in taking this one evening seminar?

What do you think?

There must be something in the air because I have been asked about photo collages and storyboards quite recently by a small handful of people, including my mother. So I thought I’d try to answer your questions all at once and show you how I have been doing it and some options.

First off, I use the two terms, storyboard and photo collage interchangeably. I may be incorrect in this and if I am, please let me know. I think they are the same thing. What do you think?

The way I have been doing it is what I wrote about in this post, using the triptych, diptych and various storyboard actions from the Coffeeshop. I use PhotoShop CS3 and her actions work great and are super easy. If you have PhotoShop or Elements and are not familiar with how to install actions, Rita has a great tutorial here. You can also do a Google search and find many resources for this.

I also have been known to build my own collages in PhotoShop. I often use a grid view and use ruler guides to help me place and size my photos similar to what you see below.

I also do scrapbook style page collages that you have seen in my 52 Week Project posts. Similar to this one:

For these, I just use my digital scrapbook papers and elements to put them all together; sometimes helter skelter, sometimes with a plan.

Another option for photo collages is one that can be done without the aid of PhotoShop. Did you read that right? Photo collages without PhotoShop!!! Free!!!

Have you seen Picnik yet? If you use Flickr you might be familiar with their site. They offer tons of free photo editing options. You can upload your images directly to Picnik or you can pull your images off of your Flickr photostream. You can edit photos, make basic collages, make fancy scrapbook style collages, make a slide show and even put your images on various novelty items like grandma’s new favorite coffee cup!

If you like what you see on Picnik you can sign up for their premium service for a pretty reasonable price of $24.95 a year. Then you have access to lots of even greater editing and collage options.

Here’s an example of a collage I just created using Picnik.

So there are a few options of making photo collages. Are you super confused or are you excited to get out your photos and start making collages and storyboards? They can be so much fun. I am sure you will agree.

Let me know if you have any questions. I’m here for you!

So I totally bombed week 5. I took some photos on Saturday but I don’t like how any of them turned out. I think I’m going to just skip week 5. Maybe not. We’ve been looking at houses in hopes of moving soon and so I took a bunch of photos but I was focusing more on the houses instead of my kids. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll be able to pull something together for week 5 but I’m not going to worry too much about it now. It’s onto week 6!

Today my boys were all hanging out on my bed (I’m sick today). We were playing with Legos, building spaceships. I built one for my youngest son but then lost interest in building and pulled out my camera and started shooting photos of them. A few turned out OK and so I put them together for my week 6 page. It was fun to do because I did a different action on each one. I guess it’s a bit incoherent design-wise but then I’m not a designer, that’s my husband.

EDIT:
I got off my butt and made a week 5 collage. On our house hunting adventures I did end up taking a few shots of my kids. I thought maybe I could use those. So here it is…

If anyone wants to share their 52 week projects, we would LOVE to see them!

If you want to use the little 52 week graphic, feel free. The html for posting it into your post is:

I’m not posting anything really photography related today. I need to sit down and write a post in response to a question I got the other day (Kelsey I am going to answer your question about collages/storyboards on my next post). I just have been letting my pregnancy induced laziness take over my life this week. I also need to figure out what to do for this week’s 52 Week Project. I’m thinking I might either photograph body parts, like feet, ears, noses, eyes, etc. or maybe I’ll have the boys pick a toy and we’ll photograph them playing. I don’t know. It’s Thursday already and I had better do something quick or it’ll be Saturday and have to race to figure something out!

So I just saw this cute GIF on a blog I follow. I love your comments so I thought I’d post the GIF and tell everyone how much I appreciate you who actually read what I have to say. I’m not quite sure why you keep coming back but I enjoy writing it so I’ll keep it up! Your comments always make me happy. This isn’t a plea for comments. I know you’re there. I love you even if you don’t comment!

I have to say that I even love my spam comments. They never fail to make me laugh. I don’t show those to you so they are kind of like my personal little joke.

This is from a 1943 book Stunts and Tumbling for Girls by Virginia Lee Horne. If you want to include this GIF on your site go to her blog post and grab it. She’s giving it away free.

Is this getting harder or is it just me? I keep forgetting to take pictures until Saturday. It really is a reminder that I need to get my camera out more regularly. Even though we’re spending most of our time indoors that is no excuse!!!

Here is my Week 4 page for this 52 Week project. My boys were helping me with a job of cleaning dead leaves off our deck. It was pretty funny. My youngest was buck naked (we’re in the middle of potty training and this seems to work for him) but he grabbed my husband’s size 13 running shoes and a broom. It was so funny I couldn’t resist snapping a bunch of shots. My oldest had the snow shovel and my middle son was also using a broom but he we more interested in pretending he was flying on it rather than helping with the leaves. Classic family photo op!

If you are also working on a 52 week project and want to use the little 52 week graphic, feel free. You can share yours here with this Mr.Linky thingamabob.

The html for posting it into your post is: