best friends

two of our neighbors were walking by our house this morning and i could not resist taking this picture of them! too cute!

i'm bumbling around photoshop with nothing but a scott kelby book, which is pretty good except when things don't work right. for example, the saturation is much better on my photoshop window than on my email attachment or on this blog page, which is frustrating me right now. to me this shot as it appears on the blog looks quite a bit more grayish than the way it appears on my aperture and photoshop screens.

assignment black and white

a friend of mine is leaving soon and she let me take some pictures of her kids for her. i used some of them to answer the "black and white" assignment in my class. it was fun to go back to black and white photography - haven't done it since college, when it was my life. all those darkroom hours and skills gone. now learning photoshop elements instead: not quite as romantic, but a whole lot easier than chemicals with a small child in the house.


fun with photoshop ...

on this one i think i overphotoshopped. i erased the dark circles under her eyes, sharpened (wasn't in perfect focus), edge vignetted, slight spotlight effect on her face. fun to practice, though.

assignment: minimize distractions

our latest assignment was minimizing clutter/distractions in the background. this could be done either by moving (obviously) or by using a shallow depth of field. easier to do outside; virtually impossible in my house!

sunset on hilton head

last photos from this vacation, because now it is time to ...

happier wildlife pics

dolphins leapt in the waters right in front of our beach - sometimes barely even 6 feet away! they seemed to follow alongside as you walked on the beach.

janell rescued a tipped over horseshoe crab that was caught on a timber and couldn't flip itself back over. crazy looking creatures! their tracks were all over the beaches. this one promptly crawled several yards then started to bury itself in the sand.

pelicans everywhere.

a mini photo shoot

practicing some photo shoot skills to get some pictures of this absolutely adorable 22 month old. it was the calm before the storm: cloudy light. a bit too dark though - i had to use fill flash. forgot that i could pump up my ISO. it was really right before the storm - we took pictures quickly and raindrops started falling as we came back.

her father's smile!

first assignment

here are the pics i took with my first betterphoto.com assignment: capturing a picture of a child looking and laughing directly into the camera. i had to submit pairs of photos: a "before" pic of the child almost-but-not-quite connecting with the camera - this could be a genuine smile but looking slightly off camera, or a not-quite-relaxed smile. for example, here's one of my before/afters above.

miss m. is one of our neighbors - we share a backyard fence. she has an absolutely winning smile and loves the camera.

here's the only one i could get of boo. the main critiques from the instructor on these photos: the one with boo is taken from an angle that was a bit too low - he looks like he's leaning away from the camera a bit. i'll definitely acknowledge that - i must have taken like 100+ photos to get one decent one of him! i also have to work on my focus - the eyes are not absolutely sharp in some of miss m's photos. i changed my focus to center-weighted to try and work on that.

bathtime

first foray into photoshop. i'm taking a betterphoto.com online course - my first formal photography course ever! - called "photographing children and babies." this is the second assignment: shooting the child as a "botanical" - isolating those parts of kids that we love to stare at.

it's becoming quite frustrating to take pictures of boo these days - he mostly declares "NO PICTURES mommy! put that camera away!" so in a sense this assignment was easier than the last one (which required getting a relaxed shot of evan looking directly into the camera. ha! not happening!)

i'm loving this course so far. you can look at all the photos that the other students take and the instructor's comments on those shots too. there's also a q&a forum that is helpful. i thought i could learn this stuff from a book, but i think that now i'm at the point in my photography (or my life) that i need the extra push of this course.

thanks to this course, i've already ...
- perused my nikon d80 book a lot more to recall what each button does and what all the terms mean
- realized that although my 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 lens is beautiful for most needs, it doesn't have a large enough aperture for me to take good inside pictures with natural light. so i bought a 50mm f/1.8 that is great!
- learned some techniques for improving exposure without resorting to flash - increasing the ISO, and the new lens with the larger aperture capability
- become more facile with changing white balance and ISO on my camera (though definitely still working on this)
- become motivated to learn more photoshop. just bought a scott kelby book on amazon. now i know that the d80 book that i bought didn't motivate me to use my camera as well as this course has, but hopefully i can dodge the need for another course ... or maybe not.

this site was recommended by my neighbor, who works part time as a children's photographer. the course was a christmas present :)