MomShots

I was given an opportunity to try out a canvas print from Easy Canvas Prints. I have been watching posts on other blogs and comments by a few friends about canvas prints. I like them. They give your photograph a gallery kind of feel. They are very clean looking with no frame around them to distract from the image.

Well, first off I had a hard time picking which photograph to use. I knew I wanted to use a shot of my baby girl since she’s 18 months and I still hadn’t printed any photos of just her for my wall. Then I couldn’t decide if I should print a current shot or one from days past. After thinking about it for far too long, I decided to go with a shot from July of 2010, when she was just a couple months old. She is wearing her little Blessing/Christening dress. It’s just a head shot but you can see some of the white lace from the dress and the fuzz from the sheepskin she’s laying on.

I ended up cropping the shot a little bit so that it would fit on an 11″x14″ canvas. Here’s the original with a yellow line showing how I cropped it:

You have some choices as to how the edge is treated. You can do a mirror image, which works great for solid or patterned areas. You can kind of stretch the image out around the edges, called Image Wrap or you can have a solid color put around the edges. You can click on each option and see how it would look on your finished canvas so you know exactly what you are choosing.

An Image Wrap and Mirror image didn’t really work for my photo. I thought it looked kind of messy and distracting. But that was just because of my specific image. Other images look great this way. I chose to do the solid color around the edges. You can enter in a specific Pantone color or you can use a dropper and select a color from your photo. I went with the creamy white of the sheepskin.

The entire process is really easy and fun. Easy Canvas Prints navigation system is not hard to use at all. Any upgrades or options that you might want to choose are laid out before you, plain and simple.

I received my canvas a couple of days later. I was so excited I tore it open like a kid on Christmas. My babies big brown eyes were staring out at me, printed on canvas. It was love at first site. I got a nail and hung it up in my hallway right away. I love walking past it. It has transformed a boring little wall into my own private gallery show!

Here is the canvas in my front entry with my other family photos. This isn’t her permanent home but it photographed here a little better. You can also see how well it goes with framed photos in this shot. I love it!

I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you the one teensy negative thing that I found. The image that I used has a large spot on her cheek and temple that are very light. They are not completely blown out on my original. I can see the skin detail when I look at the original in Aperture or Photoshop, but on the canvas they are pretty blown out, which means it looks like it’s a big white spot with no skin detail. At first it kind of bugged me but it has grown on me and now I really like how it adds to the “painted” kind of look that a canvas portrays. However, if that kind of thing would bother you, make sure that the image you use doesn’t have highlight areas that are almost blown out. I may have chosen a different photograph to use if I had known that would happen. BUT, like I said, I love it now. I don’t even notice the blown out areas anymore.

These canvases would make AMAZING holiday gifts for grandparents or other family members. Easy Canvas Prints is in the midst of a pretty great sale right now too. You can get 25% off of any standard canvas plus free shipping. Woo-hoo! That’s a great deal!!! I highly recommend using this company. The hardest part of the whole process is picking the photograph to use!

Here’s a shot of it in it’s permanent home, the hallway wall between my boys’ bedroom and the hall bathroom door. I wanted to show you how great it looks here but I couldn’t manage to get a good photo of the whole hallway. This will have to do.

The end result of all of this is a canvas print that I will treasure forever. If you get one, I’m sure you’ll love it too!

An alternate title could be The Magic of Photoshop in Skilled Hands.

Remember this photo that we talked about a while ago?

Before:

After:

Magic? Yes!

My dear friend, Tye offered to fix the background for me. She used her White Photoshop Magic and made the background look so much better. She got rid of the car and now it looks like a photo I would like to print out and give to my sister in law as a gift.

Now my stance on photography is that we need to do as much “in camera” as possible. We need to try not to make mistakes like this that need to be fixed in Photoshop. But when we do make those mistakes, sometimes they can be repaired with a little help from Photoshop (and awesome friends who can make the fixes look amazing).

I wasn’t busy enough… (sarcasm is oozing between these letters)

so I challenged myself to create a set of postcards.

I was trying to keep them within a self imposed range of non-personalness (yes, that is a made up word). I don’t usually take photos of object, mostly children, so this was a fun foray into another field of interest for me.

Shutter Sisters had a pen pal challenge a while back. You signed up and they paired you with another reader and then we would send snail mail to each other. I jumped at the chance to meet someone new and to send/receive snail mail. I love mail. Finding mail in my mailbox is just so fun. Especially when it is not a bill!!!

So with the pen pal project as my inspiration, I decided to make these postcards and then either send them to my new pen pal and/or to send them to people I actually know, kind of as a surprise.

I printed these through moo.com. I was really pleased with how fun and easy the whole process was. I made each image in Photoshop and then uploaded them. Then I received them about a week later in the mail. The quality was great. I will definitely order from them again!

Did this just turn into an add for moo.com? Unintentionally.

Just a fun thing you can do with your photos. You can use them for all sorts of things; invitations for parties, thank you notes or a fun surprise in the mail for your mom or a friend from high school. Your imagination is your limit!

They aren’t called Fan Pages anymore are they?

Well whatever they are called, I would love it if you would click on the “Like” button and become a fan of MomShots.

Maybe one day soon I’ll even post a new, exciting and informative blog post.

Maybe, if you’re lucky.

hehehe…

If you see this post today, I would like to encourage you to click on this link and head over to JPG Magazine and vote for one of our favorite DadShot contributors, Shaun Nelson. He has a great photo of his son in his luchador costume that is perfect for the current theme of Heroes.

I voted.

I hope you will too.

Because it is an awesome DadShot.

I am comfortable with my actions. I am comfortable with the mid-levels of PhotoShop that I know. I have learned so much since I started using the program and am MUCH more comfortable with it than I first was. I’m not totally intimidated by it anymore. I can let myself experiment and try new things.

But I am comfortable in the little rut I have gotten into.

Curves are an important and useful tool in regulating how your image looks. I have never really played with them. I didn’t really “get” it. I still don’t totally “get” it, but I am now inspired and excited to learn and eventually fully “get” it.

I found a great post by Mommy’s Camera in my RSS feed this morning about using curves. I tried it out and it turns out I’m not totally scared of them.

Yay me!

If you are like me and would like to understand Curves a bit better, check out her post and then pick a photo and go experiment.

This may not be the best example but it is one of the best ones from a little photo shoot yesterday. Here is a picture of Eva Marie (and the back of her adorable cousin Miles’ head, who happened to be born on the very same day!!!). It was a bit dark and I used curves to lighten it up. Ok, so it’s not a good example at all because I hardly did anything. I don’t even know if you’ll see the difference.

Original:

Curves adjusted to make slightly lighter and brighter.

Well, that’s all I’ve got today. Go check out the post on Mommy’s Camera about curves. She has a some great examples and gives some really great advice and thoughts about using curves. I really enjoyed it.

Posting may be sporadic for the next few weeks. I hope you can forgive me. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with some helpful tips for newborn photography. You can bet I’ll be taking a whole lot of pictures!

My very talented friend, Luann Hawker of Whole Grain Photography did a maternity shoot of me last week. It was really fun and kind of super strange to be on the opposite side of the camera.

I am really glad that I took the chance to do it. Since this is supposed to be my last pregnancy, I now have some great documentation of the experience. Plus, I got to ask any strobist questions that I could think of and see how Luann set up her off camera flashes - something I have zero experience in. It was a really fun day and I now have some great shots to remember this time in my life by.

Thanks so much, Lu!!! I love them!

Here are a few of my favorites:

I think the moral of the story is that if you are pregnant, it is very nice to document this seemingly endless, yet in reality, very short period of your life. It goes fast. Plus, it is so important to have photos of yourself included in your family collection. My family photograph collection is severely lacking in photos of our “momtographer”. Here’s a little effort to remedy that.

Do you get the Photojojo email newsletter? I’ve talked about it in the past. Some days I skim over it and delete, other days my imagination is captured. Today was one of those imagination capturing days. Not in an “I’ve got to make that” kind of way like it usually is, but in an “I like looking at pictures of people” kind of way.

The photographer Simon Høgsberg was featured in today’s newsletter. He made a GIANT photo using pictures he took over a period of 20 days. You can see it here. I think it is pretty fun and interesting.

Now I want to grab my camera and take random pictures of strangers.

Or create a project I can be obsessed with and excited about for more than a few days.

Does that sound creepy?

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.