MomShots

This isn’t a Momshots giveaway but a giveaway over at The Vintage Pearl.  Her friend makes these beautiful camera strap covers and you can win one.  Check out her site and follow her instructions.  I hope I win, but if you win I will be equally excited!!!

Over the past few weeks, through my kitchen window, I have been watching my neighbor’s little maple tree turn from lush green to vibrant yellow and then slowly turn crimson.  It was been really a magnificent journey.  Each day the beautiful colors would make me catch my breath.  They were so vivid and were a true testament that Autumn is here.   One day I noticed that a few leaves were falling off of it.  As the day progressed, I noticed that it wasn’t just a few leaves, it was as if the tree had decided to just let go of its leaves and they were falling in bunches; hordes even.  I am now looking at a naked tree.  From Friday to Monday, all the leaves have fallen and November has begun.  A new season is truly here.

I am a bit disappointed with myself.  I thought over and over again that I should take some photos.  Not once did I do that.  I always had an excuse.  My main excuse was that it wasn’t a very good composition with the fence in the way.  Now I have missed my chance.  Yeah, sure I might be able to try again next year, but in reality it won’t be the same tree.  Even if we weren’t moving in a month, the tree would be different, more grown and older.  

I have these same thoughts about my kids.  Oh, I don’t want to get the camera out right now, I’m (insert lame excuse here).  We have to just get out the camera and shoot away or we will miss these precious moments forever.  

Each turning season reminds me that my children are getting older.  This Halloween I was reminded of that by thinking about what they had dressed as in past years.  This year we had an Indiana Jones and a Wall-e.  I am remiss to report that I didn’t dress Magnus up.  He was going to be a sailor but I didn’t do it.  How’s that for letting time pass?  I didn’t even give him the chance to be something.  In the end, I really don’t think it mattered because he had a really good time helping dad hand out candy to Trick-or-Treaters.  

Our neighborhood was a mad house.  My husband would sit down for literally 30 seconds and the doorbell would ring.  This went on all night - for a solid three hours.  We totally ran out of candy.  I think it was about the same time that our neighbors also ran out of candy too so it worked out.  

All in all, we had a wonderful Halloween.  My boys loved their costumes.  Gar was wearing Wall-e for the next two days and talking in a Wall-e voice.  Uly has been wearing his Indy hat and playing with his whip every chance he can.  He even asked to sleep with his whip the other night.  Good times!

They have been stuffing themselves with candy.  Ben and I just let them eat their candy until they couldn’t eat anymore.  I love how they will randomly appear with a sucker in their mouth after I think that all the candy is gone.  I may be finding little stashes through the next year!  That’s part of the fun of Halloween!

I hope your Halloween was a good one and your kids had fun and their bellies are full of sugar.  I also hope you drug out that camera and managed to get some great shots of your kids.  But more importantly, I hope you managed to get some shots of your kids.  The most important thing is to document their fun and memories.  We don’t need to be discouraged if our photos don’t turn out exactly as we had hoped.  We just need to take some.  Along the way we will end up with some great ones.  Hopefully!

If you are located in the Utah Valley area you may be interested in a great tip I just saw over at Make and Takes.  Located in American Fork, Tilt Photography is sponsoring a portrait session for all your costumed kids.  Bring your kids on Wednesday, October 29th between 4-8 pm and for only $10 you can have a portrait taken, which includes one 5×7 print and a one high resolution copy of your photo emailed to you.  

a fantastic workshop put on by a fantastic photographer on Saturday night.  Sara Boulter, is a really talented photographer who produces stunning images - and especially stunning images of children.  I love to look at her site and get inspiration.  She is based out of Salt Lake City and Saturday night (I’m writing this on Monday), I got to go up and participate in her Better Pictures Workshop.  The super cool thing about it was that it was completely geared toward moms taking better pictures of their kids.  Yay!  That’s exactly what Momshots is all about so I jumped on board with that the second I heard about it.

I won’t replay the workshop second by second for you, but I do want to share a few of the tips that I learned.  Sara had so many good ideas and suggestions.  Things that really hit home and I am excited to implement in my photography.

One of the first things I want to discuss is that we need to make sure we get in our own Momshots.  We need to remember that these photos we are taking are going to be the visual memories of our children in the future.  We need to give them opportunities to remember what we looked like and to see how we interacted.  I for one, need to work on this BIG TIME!  I have been in maybe three photos in the past year.  I ordered a remote control for my camera and have been reading up on how the self timer works.  I am going to make a concerted effort to put myself in more photos with my kids.   

If you check out Sara’s site, she has a wonderful photo in her portfolio section under the title of Family.  This is the one where the beautiful mom is kissing her son in front of a red brick wall.  This photo is actually Sara and her son.  She took it using her car as a platform/tripod for her camera.  She set the timer and ran to get in the shot.  I love this shot.  I think it is just beautiful and very ingenious once you know how she came about it.  She did a little bit of cropping and editing in Photoshop and the end result is a major keeper!

Another point she brought up was that you don’t always need to show your child smiling.  When you capture the “real” moments in your child’s life you are preserving the memories of real life.

Here’s one I took in the car of Mag just as he was starting to cry.  Obviously not a fantastic photograph, but it show the real moments in my life.  And for this reason I love it.

 The theme that we came back to over and over was that photographs evoke emotion.  They preserve our memories and help our children to know where they came from.  Photographs can be an extremely important tool in helping our children know their past.

Sara had a ton of other really fantastic points and ideas.  She spoke about lighting, when to use the flash, how to get certain shots and angles, among other things.  She discussed that we need to be aggressive in getting the shots.  We need to not be afraid to lay down on the ground, stand over the top of our kids while they lay on the bed or floor, climb up on things and generally anything it takes to get the shot.  

Another point she mentioned, and you’ll recognize this from my past posts, is to be familiar with your camera.  Know what kind of camera you have and how to use all the features.  Read the manual!!!!  <- Did you notice the four exclamation marks and bold face?  It is so important.   

Anyway, I had a great time.  I learned some really good tips and have some good things to focus on and try.  Personally, I have a little more motivation to print out more of my shots and put them up around my house.  I am also going to work on getting new and fresh angles into my shots as well.

So as I sat on the couch yesterday, playing with my camera and thinking about angles, I took this one of Uly.  He was leaning over the stair rail talking to me as I was sitting on the couch below.  This is how I saw him - he really did look upside down.

I went on Amazon.com to see if there was a book for my Nikon D40x.  Often there are books available with specific details about your camera - more than just the users manual.  So I wanted to see if there was anything for my new camera.  There were a few available.  Yay!

You know how on Amazon you can sometimes see excerpts from the books you are thinking about buying?  Well I love that feature.  Especially tonight.  The book I was looking at had an excerpt and can you guess what it was?  It was the exact problem I have been having; how to adjust the aperture.  Now, I know I could have found it in the manual, but it is kind of dry reading and in the limited amount of time I have had to read through it, I haven’t found my answer.  Ten seconds on Amazon and I found my answer.

I’m still very much an advocate of keeping, reading and familiarizing yourself with your manual but it doesn’t hurt to have extra help.  I will continue to take my manual to the gym.  I will read it.  However I am waiting patiently for this new book to come and take my manual reading experience to a whole new level.

So below is one of the first photos I have taken with my new camera.  Uly drew a picture of me and one of his daddy using stick people.  His Sunday school teacher taught him about stick figures.  I probably should have, but I guess it slipped my mind…

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Really I have no idea how to spell that word.  It is “two” and “for” shoved together.  Hopefully you’ll read it and understand.  Basically, this week’s Tip of the Week is a double whammy.  Tye wrote us up two tips for the price of one!  They are both awesome tips and I’m super excited to put my kids to bed and play around with Photoshop tonight (only 8 more hours to go; I don’t think putting them to bed at noon would really fly that well…).  I want to try out both of these processes very much.

I realized the other day that I really need to learn Photoshop much better.  I am just limping along using my actions and a few things I know (that I have learned from Tye’s Tip of the Week tutorials) but I have a long way to go.  I see so many photographers and I often think that their post processing skills are what makes them great.  There is usually a little more to it than that, but I think if I had better post processing skills my photos would look a bit more professional.  So I need to practice that.  Just like I am practicing my photography skills, I need to focus on post processing as well.

So I will.  Practice that is.  Tonight after I put the kids in bed, I will try to get some practice in on these two Tips.  I’m excited!!!

So… you read the post where I got a new camera?  I still am limping along.  I have really been struggling to find time to read the manual.  I took it with me to the gym yesterday and read it while I was on the stationary bike, but this morning I decided to sleep in instead.  Tomorrow!

I guess I have the Auto mode fully figured out.  And the preset modes aren’t that hard to understand either.  I am just having a hard time figuring out how to use the manual modes.  I mean, I can’t figure out how to adjust the aperture.  Strange.  It’s a pretty automated camera and that’s cool.  It’s kind of a cross between automated and manual.  I just haven’t figured out how to use the manual yet.  I will.

More practice.  And reading.  And then practice.

I thought my learning curve would be a little less steep.  I thought I’d pick it up and be as comfortable with it as I was on my old Nikon D100.  I know I will in a week or two but it’s just taking more time than I thought it would.  Plus, I have felt really busy and haven’t actually been able to set time aside for playing with it.  I grab it when I’m cooking dinner or when I am waiting for something.  I haven’t really given it my full attention.

Ok, I should sign off.  Mag just unrolled a full roll of paper towels and is playing in it.  He’s wrapping paper towels around himself like a cute little mummy baby.  Insert imaginary picture here -> <- 

On last thing…  Don’t forget to think about what you would like to learn to be able to scrapbook your photos.  We got some great ideas yesterday but would love some more.  Let us know what is on your mind.

Do you want to learn how to scrapbook your photos using your computer?  You can do pretty much everything digitally that you can with paper and even more.  I love to use the techniques I have learned to make baby book pages for my kids, birthday invitations, calendars, thank you cards, etc.  I have used them to make our color book and ABC book too.  There are so many cool things you can do once you learn the basics.  

We at Momshots have a secret weapon: Our one and only, Tip of the Week editor, Tye Durbin!!!  She can teach us how to do all those cool things.  She wants to teach us how to do all these cool things!  Yeah, basically she’s awesome.

The situation here is that she needs your suggestions.  What do you want to learn?  She is taking all the suggestions, questions and comments and putting them into tutorial form and making a disc out of them.  So if you are curious as to how to make something special let her know.  You can let her know by either posting a comment at the end of this post, using the Contact page or emailing me; momshots at yahoo dot com.  

Admittedly I have much to learn in this area but I do think it is very important to document my children’s lives.  Here is an example of one of the pages I have made.  I am a little embarrassed to share this with you but I will throw caution to the wind and do it anyway.  We’re all friends here, right?

Come on!  You know you want to know how to make little brads or gel dots.  Just ask!  She’ll tell you how and you’ll get a disc not only with your questions but everyone else’s too!  

I feel like today is Christmas.  Except it isn’t cold, I don’t have to cook a whole bunch and nobody else got presents…  Why?  If you didn’t guess why from the title of this post, it is because I got a new camera today.  Well, it’s not new new, but new enough and new to me.  We have a friend who bought my current dream camera (a Nikon D90) and generously sold his old Nikon D40x to us for a song.  While I am still saving my pennies for that future D90, I’m going to go hog wild using this great little D40x!  That’s right HOG wild.  Oink!  Oink!

Right now the battery is charging and I am watching carefully for the charge light to go off.  Who knows what might happen if I don’t watch it?  Who knows…  So I am watching carefully.  Actually, I’m not.  I’m sharing my exciting news with you.  Then the second I finish this post, I am going to immerse myself in the user manual and see what this little camera can do.  

It is little.  I feel like it is so little.  It’s just so cute.  I put my old lens on it and the old lens weighs more than the camera.  The new lens is going to be so much fun to play with too.  It is 18mm to 55mm so I get to experience a whole new layer of photography since my old lens is a fixed 60mm.  I get to play around with zooming.  Watch me zooooommmm!!!!

Ok, I think I’m getting a little silly here.  I am going to leave you with a photo I took of my neice, Cora.  It has nothing to do with this post except that it was taken with a camera…

So enjoy your day, my friends.  I am going to be quite click happy for the rest of the day!  I will get back to you soon to let you know my thoughts on all the cool new features I have access to on this new little camera.

This is a blog dedicated to reuniting lost cameras and memory sticks with their owners.  I think it is a wonderful idea.  If you have lost a camera check for it there and if you find a camera post it there as well. 

I would like to type up a long post this morning about something fun but I don’t think it is going to happen.  My kids are all antsy to get going with our day.  Magnus is literally climbing on my back right now.

So instead of posting something about nothing I will make a quick note about the new Tip of the Week.  This week’s tip is about using the Eyedropper tool.  This is a very useful tool.  I think you are really going to like this tip.

And also a reminder that we save all of our past Tips.  You can pull up any of the Tips by simply going to the Tip of the Week tab (up above).

This post’s obligatory photo is from last year.  One of the first snows.  My boys were so excited to go play in it but I made them slow down for a second so I could get some shots of them.  We are starting to get excited for snow for this Winter.  I’ve been going through the checklist to make sure everyone has all the necessary gear for warm, cold weather fun!