MomShots

We have a guest post today from Lori Brooks. She is a lady I met on Twitter and has been kind enough to offer to share a few of her photos. I think pets and children have a lot of the same challenges for photographers. They are both so wiggly and have a mind of their own and rarely listen and do exactly what you tell them to do.

Take it away, Lori!

Thank you so much to MomShots for allowing me to do a guest post for her, I am honored to be included in her wonderful blog. I am a petsitter and with each new client I take their photo and then display it on my facebook page, this photo welcomes them to my business family. Here are a few of my favorite animals ..

Cooper, there is not a person or animal this dog does not like, he makes friends with cats, dogs, people, anyone. Even if the dog is barking at him all aggresive, he just wags his tail and smiles “lets be friends”.

Madison, she is a rascal full of spunk and personality. it is true that dogs do reflect their owners cause she is just like her owner my friend crystal. She loves to cuddle yet she puts up a fuss when its time to go to her room, makes me smile every time.

Shadow, a fireball of energy and a lover. this dog can go from 0 to 60 when walking at a moments notice. She also loves affection and attention. But who wouldn’t living in a household of 6 people.

Thanks for sharing your shots, Lori!

If anyone else has any shots or thoughts they would like to share on MomShots, send me an email.

Are you following MomShots on Facebook? If you aren’t, you should. It’s super easy. Plus it makes me feel good. Just click on the blue button to the right —-> that says “Follow this Blog”.

Done.

Super Easy.

Do it now.

Please.

Hi! I’m a friend of Jessica’s, and she asked me to visit and share a little. This is a bit intimidating, because I know next to nothing about photography, but luckily she asked me to talk about one aspect of photography I do know: handing my camera over to my kid.

My daughter Zoe is 3 1/2, and she LOVES taking pictures. She walks through the house snapping photos of whatever takes her fancy, and while some of the results are …. interesting:

sometimes they’re really neat.

By looking at the pictures she takes, I’ve learned some lessons to incorporate into my own photography attempts.

Get close. Really close.

Capture those everyday moments you wouldn’t think to photograph,

and the moment just after that.

Pick colorful subjects.

Most of her picture taking sessions come randomly- when she asks to use my camera.  One fun adventure came, however, on a day we went out for a walk with the express intention of taking pictures of things she was thankful for.  They included the sun:

and a dumpster (we have yet to figure out the reason for that one):

Since she really does get such great joy from taking pictures, we’ve considered getting her one of the cameras that they make specifically for kids, but have decided against it at this point. The quality of the prints is reportedly low, and with the great photos she’s taking, they deserve to be seen in higher quality. And this way she’s learning respect for the camera - she’s quite careful, and knows how to turn it off and on, and most importantly, to put it back where it belongs when she’s done.

When I asked Zoe to tell me about why she likes using the camera, this is what she said,

“I like to take pictures of my plants because I love them. I like to use the camera because it’s so great.”

This is a crosspost. I don’t think many people read my family blog and I wanted to share the good news with you, my fantastic MomShots readers.

Plus, I’m kind of on a posting spree. Have you noticed? This will be the third post in as many days. Maybe I am coming out of my slump and will start writing some posts with substance. I am thinking about hosting a cool contest next month too. That’s fun!

I think I totally spaced mentioning it here. I put everything on Facebook but since this is kind of my diary/journal I need to put it here too. We went in for the ultrasound on the 21st of December and are happy to report that everything looks good. Besides having a healthy baby, we are excited to report that our 4th and final baby is a girl!!!! We are beyond the moon excited about this fact. We were happy to only have boys and thankful for all of our children but there was always a little part of us that hoped we would also have a girl. Ben is finally getting his “daddy’s little girl” and I’m going to get my little dolly. We are so thankful and excited for this gift.

MomShots Tip of The Day: Grab your camera and capture those funny moments that make you laugh. Easy. Simple.

I like sun flares. A trick I learned from my friend Luann Hawker is that the smaller the aperture opening the better and more defined the sun flare will be, hence the f/22 on this shot…

Should I feel feel flattered when I check my spam filter and find 200 comments but they are all written in Russian? At least if they are in a language and alphabet I can’t decipher I can pretend they are all insightful comments.

This comment is not a ply for comments. A person actually has to update her blog once in a while in order to get comments. I know you are there. It is just a funny thought I wanted to share about spam.

So… Did anyone get any good shots over the holidays? Would you like to share them with other MomShots readers? Send me an email at momshots@yahoo.com and we’ll get them up here for the whole world to see right away.

Come on. You know you want to!

Besides, what better way to learn from each other than to share our images and thoughts together.

Email them now…

I asked and have received! MomShots reader, Dhita sent me these three adorable photos of her daughter. She said:

This is my 8 month old daughter. Since she was born, I always am fascinated by the way she yawns. It’s contagious, but at the same time simply cute.

As you can see, her yawn is totally contagious. It’s so cute. In fact, I think I am going to go take a nap now…

Yawn…

I think this kind of thing is so important to capture so you can remember. Those sweet little faces change as they grow and sometimes they stop making the same expression. I think being able to look back on those little angels and remember is such a wonderful blessing. Plus, when Dihta’s daughter grows up and has a baby she will be able to show her how similar they looked and that is going to mean a lot to both of them.

Simply beautiful! Thank you so much for sharing with us.

Do you have any shots of your children you would like to share? We would all love to see them and read your thoughts on them. Email me at MomShots@yahoo.com or send me a message on the contact page.

Do you get Photodojo emails? I love them. They often speak to my crafty/DIY side. Today’s email has made me a little excited. I think I may be making some of these. Maybe. I’m running out of time but maybe. Just maybe…

The picture is too large but I’m going with it anyway. Can you deal?

Photojojo DIY Cork Coasters

Their super simple instructions can be found here.

I love getting questions for readers. It is better than comments. It is better than actually knowing people read me. It makes me so happy! But I got a question that has me kind of stumped.

Here is the question:

Hello! I have a question for you. I want to take pictures of my daughters holding a strand of Christmas lights and the lights be what illuminates them. Last night I tried it in a darkened room and if my flash was on, it was so bright that it looked like a light was on in the room and it didnt show that the lights were lit. If the flash is off, well you know, then you cant really take a picture of kids who wont be still for even half a second! So, do you have any tips on how to do this?? Thanks!–Amber

First off, thanks so much for sending me a question, Amber. It is such a good one!

So I tried an experiment. I set my son up on a chair in my living room one evening. The lights were on. He was holding Christmas lights and was really fascinated with them so keeping him in one place wasn’t too hard. He gave me nearly a full ten minutes (maybe a little less, but it was an eternity compared to his usual activity level) of sitting still so I got to take a few handfuls of shots. I tried with the ambient lights on, off, with flash and without flash.

I liked this one the best but still I’m not satisfied with my results enough to give advice on the issue.

What seemed to work for me was to keep the living room lights on. It gave enough ambient light that I was able to shoot him without the flash. I didn’t touch my white balance and so it has kind of a red tint to it, but I really like that as I think it gives a more warm snugly feeling to the shot.

I played around with my ISO, boosting it between 200 and 1600. The shot above was at an ISO of 200 and I didn’t like the resulting graininess. It was too much on my camera.

I only tried two shots with the flash and I really hated those results. While they were brighter, I just didn’t like the shadows behind the heads and I didn’t like that the lights weren’t as “glowy” as they had been on the faces.

To sum things up:

Which leads me to my last point; take tons of shots. I took 61 shots in the space of ten minutes. Out of those 61, I only had a very small handful of shots that I even dared showing you. I should have clicked that shutter button more!

So, my experiment was not very successful. Does anyone have any advice that they can offer Amber and I? It’s the perfect time of year to try these shots. It’s the perfect time of year to figure out this photographic problem! Let’s figure it out together.

I got a chance to go up to Salt Lake City yesterday, and play with a Lensbaby optic. If you are unfamiliar with what this is, as I was, it is a manual lens that you screw onto your camera and it creates a really fun blurring action and sun flares. It is definitely a toy, and not a must have lens, in my opinion. But it sure was fun! I have a few more photography items that are higher up on my must have list (like a new camera) but this was so much fun that I after I have checked that off my list, a Lensbaby will be surely added.

This was part of my local photowalking group, Photowalking Utah and courtesy of Lensbaby and Pictureline, a SLC based photo supply store. I had so much fun hanging out with other photogs and getting to know my friends Luann Hawker and Jennifer Grigg better. Both fun ladies and excellent photographers.

If you have not sought out your local photowalking group, I highly recommend it. It is such a wonderful resource for meeting friends and learning more about photography. If you don’t have a local photowalking group, you should totally start one. Today.

Here are a few of the images I took. I really enjoyed taking shots of inanimate objects. It’s funny they don’t run away or make silly faces at you like kids do. Of course, my love is capturing kids, but it was sure a fun break to photograph something different.