MomShots

I have shown this photo previously but I love it. This is part of my documentation of Eva Marie’s fourth month. She’s nearly six months now and I should really do another little shoot to document her fifth month. In the mean time, I am offering this photo as I think it fits into the current theme at I Heart Faces this week. In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month they are doing a pink theme. While this photo is not specifically pink, I think it has very pink undertones. Eva Marie’s skin, the white and red of her dress all blend together and make me think of pink. Maybe I’m stretching it a bit, but I guess it’s open to interpretation…

We recently took a little weekend trip to Southern California. On our way from Utah to SoCal, we stopped at our favorite hotel in Las Vegas, the M. It is on the extreme south end of The Strip. So south that you really have no idea that it is still on The Strip at all. But it is our favorite. It is so nice and they always give us amazing prices.

This trip was no different. We showed up without reservations, as per usual. We were given an amazing room, as per usual.

Our room was a triangular room on the 11th floor with floor to ceiling windows that looked out over the entire Las Vegas area. Not a room for someone with extreme acrophobia. I have been known to get a little white knuckled in height related situations but not this time. All I could think about were places that I wanted to put my boys to take their photo.

The beautiful morning light came and I pulled out my camera and started bossing my boys around in hopes that I might get one or two good photos. I came away with a few that I liked. This one is my absolute favorite. It may be my most favorite photo of these three brothers that I have taken in a very long time.

Do you see the problem with it? The focus is soft.

That means that it is ever so slightly out of focus. Ever so slightly.

What that really means is that my aperture was too wide. I couldn’t fit all three boys into the same plane. My depth of field was too narrow. I needed to open up my aperture just a tiny bit. This was shot using my 50mm lens. The aperture was set at f/1.8. That was my mistake.

The rule of thumb for shooting groups of people is to use at lease an aperture that is equal to the number of people in the photo. For example, there are three people in this photo so my aperture should have been set to f/3.2.

Next time…

Anyway, I decided to play with it a little bit in Photoshop and ended up adding a bit more grain. It almost makes my lack of focus seem intentional. Ummm, yeah. Intentional…

Oh well! I don’t care. I love this photo so much. I am thinking about printing it out and hanging it up in my home.

Sometimes you just have to ignore those kinds of mistakes and get on with your life. If you love a photo then you just have to go with it. You can’t beat yourself up over little mistakes. You have to move on and just do better next time, learning from your mistakes.

This is me moving on and learning from my mistake!

More shots from our hotel room:

These are a few of the other shots I took, including a snap of myself. I don’t take shots of myself very often. Here is me and our amazing view.

Magnus making faces at himself in one of the mirrored pillars.

My sweet baby toes. A very wide aperture of f/1.8 makes this shot. Everything except her big toe is out of focus and blurry. A more narrow aperture would have made the other toes in focus, or the rest of the room depending on how much I narrowed it.

There’s what is called a “Hot Spot” on Ulysses’s nose. It is that bright triangle. In photography, that is generally not acceptable. Too bright. No data recorded. I’m ignoring it in favor of his smooth, youthful skin being kissed by the beautiful morning light.

Again with the wide aperture of f/1.8. This time it makes Gar in focus while Uly is lost in bokeh (that’s the fancy schmancy photography word for blurry).

Well, that’s a bit from our trip. My MomShots Tip for this post this: Move on and learn from your mistakes. Don’t beat yourself up over shots that didn’t turn out exactly as you wanted them to. Try to figure out why your photo is not exactly how you’d have liked it to look and what you need to do to remedy that in the future. My big issue in this little photo shoot was not adjusting my aperture. For some reason I was stuck on using a wide aperture and it bit me in the tookus!

A few more MomShots Tips that you can find in this post are:

I have been playing with the soft light that filters in through my bedroom window. It is a southern exposure and has been really wonderful for photos. There are times of the day where the sun shines directly in, but that is only for a short period of time. We moved our bed under the window and I have taken nearly a million photos on that spot. Well, not a million literally. How about a couple hundred? That’s more accurate.

I have also been playing with my photos in Photoshop. I am kind of on a pink kick lately. Can you tell?

Utilizing depth of field is a great way to highlight certain features of the baby in a creative and inviting manner. To get this kind of look you have to use a large aperture. This will make the item you have bracketed in your viewfinder crisp while everything else will be fuzzy.

I have been enjoying a new photography blog that focuses on inspiration. Mortal Muses offers a common theme to use as inspiration. Right now that theme is Morning. They discuss various aspects of inspiration. I find it very… inspiring.

I love mornings. I love that time around sunrise where everything is kind of doing a figurative stretch and yawn in order to get ready to bound into the new day.

I have recently started experiencing mornings again since school began. I have been enjoying walking with my oldest son to the bus stop. Some of those mornings we are accompanied by my youngest son. These are lovely ways to begin the day.

Here is a close up shot of Magnus with a drop of sun kissing his nose. I love the half smirk thing he’s got going on too.

Speaking of smirks, that is the theme at I Heart Faces this week. Two themes in one photo! Huzzah!

Well instead of posting nothing (due to total lack of inspiration) I decided to jumpstart myself and enter this week’s I Heart Faces challenge. Why not? I don’t seem to to be posting much on this site lately.

Here’s a photo from one year ago, September 2009. This is my friend’s son and he had climbed into his dad’s pickup truck and was playing around. It is shot through the glass of the windshield which added a fun blue haze.

Deets about the shot:
Camera: Nikon D40X
Exposure: 0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture: f/2.2
Focal Length: 35 mm
ISO Speed: 200

I promised last week that I would discuss composition and the Rule of Thirds. I need to deliver on that promise; at least a little bit…

So the Rule of Thirds. Have you heard about it?

No? Hmmmmm…. How can I explain it?

I like to think of it as splitting a photo into thirds, both vertically and horizontally.

What exactly does that mean?

This is what you do… Place an imaginary grid over the top of your composition, like such.

Your goal is to make the subject line up with one of the lines.

That’s the gist of it. There really is a bit more to it than that, but that’s the starting point.

Here’s an example of a handsome young man I was recently able to photograph, Zack. See the original photo and how I framed him? He was right in the center. I did not follow the Rule of Thirds.

When I edited it, I cropped it and laid a Rule of Thirds grid over the top and rearranged how Zack sat in the composition.

I want to say that I didn’t actual place a grid over the top. Is that silly that I feel like I should say that? I just want you to know that this is an imaginary grid. Got it? OK…

I lined Zack’s body up with the far left line and also put his face on the top horizontal line. It’s kind of a double whammy since I lined him up with both horizontal and vertical lines. That’s not really necessary but it can’t hurt, right?

Here’s another example. My niece Gina. I can’t get enough of her! She is so beautiful. Here is the original:

I really liked this one. Her one eye is in sharp focus and you can see that when you lay the imaginary Rule of Thirds grid on top, it matches right up with the bottom horizontal line. Score! I didn’t have to do any editing or make any changes except to make it black and white.

The last example I want to show you is a bit more interpretive.

I really liked this photo of my son at the beach. I thought it caught a bit of the whimsy and joy he was experiencing. Every single time we would see a beach on TV, drive by a lake, river or even a puddle, Magnus would shout out, “Beach! Beach!” He has been wanting to go to the beach so bad this entire summer and this was his two hour chance to go. He was making the very best of it.

Sidenote: Did you see what I just did? I totally accessed the emotional aspect of photography for myself. This is why I take photos. This affects no one but me, but it is the number one reason I point that camera at my children. I’m sure you can all relate. It’s a MomShot and DadShot thing, isn’t it?

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Now I lay the Rule of Thirds grid over the top and I see that things don’t quite line up. Not exactly, anyway.

But do you know what? I really like it like this. I think that the lines on my Rule of Thirds grid line up enough that it works.

Or maybe that’s my motherly emotions shining through.

Either way, I like it!

Plus, that’s the awesome thing about holding the camera; you are the boss! You get to choose how you want to frame the photo. You can choose to follow this rule to the letter, or you can choose to interpret it anyway that you would like.

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).

This is my current favorite postcard from my postcard project. I love detail shots. Shots of cute little piggies, eyes, ears or even an adorable curl are the kinds of things that as mothers, we want to bottle so we can pull them out and remember how cute they were at that specific age. Photographing those details is a great way to do that.

Here’s another detail shot from my postcard project that I love. My Magnus’s eyes will melt my heart every time. He gets in trouble and then smiles up at me with those sweet chocolate eyes and my anger is always lessened. I love those eyes!

Those are my three “C’s” for today. I think they speak for themselves. I am always saying that we need to get closer. Closer and then even more close to our subject. We want to fill the entire picture with our subject. We want to see those shining sparkling eyes, rosy cheeks and pouty lips.

What else can I say about this? Why wouldn’t we want to fill the entire frame with our subject?

Composition is a great thing to think about. We haven’t really discussed the Rule of Thirds much here. I haven’t been really sure how to explain it. Look at the photo below and see the yellow lines I drew on it. These lines break the photo up in three sections both vertically and horizontally. Basically you want to put the subject of your shot on or around one of these lines. It is more pleasing to the eye.

We will discuss this more in depth later, but think about it next time you have your camera out. Put the eyes of your subject, or your subject itself on one of these lines and see how you like your photo. Do you like it better?

The final C is Cuteness. Is this self explanatory or what?!? Just get out that camera and capture all that cuteness that is dying to be photographed! It just never stops. All stages of your child’s life need to be documented and you have the skills to do it. Take lots of shots and then take a few more!

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!